Generating factual statements from data

December 18, 2014 2:32 PM

Let's say I have a large set of time series. There are a large number of factual statements that could be made about it, including some that are trivially algorithmically generated (e.g. "Soy beans are appreciating in cost faster than corn"). Is there a term for generating statements like this?
posted by phrontist to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

Response by poster: What Narrative Science does is a good example. But I'm looking for something more general than "narrative generation".
posted by phrontist at 2:34 PM on December 18, 2014

Automated feature extraction?
posted by PMdixon at 3:12 PM on December 18, 2014

Identifying trends. Look into "trend data", it's a thing.
posted by fshgrl at 3:15 PM on December 18, 2014

I might call such a thing "feature extraction," or perhaps "dimensionality reduction".

But if you want something more general than "narrative generation", then it'd have to be something like 'summarization'.
posted by pwnguin at 4:36 PM on December 18, 2014

analysis

data analysis
posted by at at 11:38 PM on December 18, 2014

BTW, you might be interested in John Tukey's book Exploratory Data Analysis.
posted by SemiSalt at 3:53 PM on December 19, 2014

I don't know of a term for this, but I do know a freely available tool that does something similar to what you are asking for Automatic Statistician.
posted by vegetableagony at 12:39 AM on January 8, 2015