Decision-making based on an improved visual analytics approach for emotion prediction

Abstract

Visual Analytics approach allows driving informed and effective decision-making. It assists decision-makers to visually interact with large amount of data and to computationally learn valuable hidden patterns in that data, which improve the decision quality. In this article, we introduce an enhanced visual analytics model combining cognitive-based visual analysis to data mining-based automatic analysis. As emotions are strongly related to human behaviour and society, emotion prediction is widely considered by decision making activities. Unlike speech and facial expressions modalities, EEG (electroencephalogram) has the advantage of being able to record information about the internal emotional state that is not always translated by perceptible external manifestations. For this reason, we applied the proposed cognitive approach on EEG data to demonstrate its efficiency for predicting emotional reaction to films. For automatic analysis, we developed the Echo State Network (ESN) technique considered as an efficient machine learning solution due to its straightforward training procedure and high modelling ability for handling time-series problems. Finally, utility and usability tests were performed to evaluate the developed prototype.