Visualizing Interaction Effects for Combinatorial Cost-Benefit Analysis

Interaction effects occur when the combined impact of multiple actions differs from the sum of their individual effects. This creates challenges for scenarios that require analyzing how different combinations of actions affect an outcome of interest (i.e., combinatorial cost-benefit analysis). Visualization techniques support interpretation, but most existing approaches rely on multiseries line charts (interaction plots), which are widely used but do not explicitly support comparing interaction effects across alternative action sets. Accordingly, we investigate visualization approaches for analyzing interaction effects in combinatorial cost-benefit analysis. We propose a method integrating multi-attribute set rankings with small-scale visualizations to facilitate comparative analysis. Through a user study, we evaluate the effectiveness of three techniques for representing two- and threeway interactions. We present preliminary findings and discuss design implications to inform future visualization research.