MIning Relationships Among variables in large datasets from CompLEx systems (MIRACLE)

Social scientists have used agent-based models (ABMs) to explore the interaction and feedbacks among social agents and their environments. Agent-based models are dynamic computer simulations of human societies and behaviours in which individuals and their interactions are explicitly represented. This bottom-up structure of ABMs enables simulation and investigation of complex systems and their emergent behaviour with a high level of detail. This detail means that such models have a very large number of variables, creating highly multidimensional “big data” that are difficult to analyse using traditional statistical methods, in part because many of the relationships among the variables are nonlinear