Boba: Authoring and Visualizing Multiverse Analyses

Understand

Multiverse analysis is an approach to data analysis in which all "reasonable" analytic decisions are evaluated in parallel and interpreted collectively, in order to foster robustness and transparency.

• However, specifying a multiverse is demanding because analysts must manage myriad variants from a cross-product of analytic decisions, and the results require nuanced interpretation.
• We contribute Boba: an integrated domain-specific language (DSL) and visual analysis system for authoring and reviewing multiverse analyses.
• With the Boba DSL, analysts write the shared portion of analysis code only once, alongside local variations defining alternative decisions, from which the compiler generates a multiplex of scripts representing all possible analysis paths.