Representative Methods of Computational Socioeconomics

Abstract: The increasing data availability and imported analyzing tools from computer science and physical science have sharply changed traditional methodologies of social sciences, leading to a new branch named computational socioeconomics that studies various phenomena in socioeconomic development by using quantitative methods based on large-scale real-world data. Sited on recent publications, this Perspective will introduce three representative methods: (i) natural data analyses, (ii) large-scale online experiments, and (iii) integration of big data and surveys. This Perspective ends up with in-depth discussion on the limitations and challenges of the above-mentioned emerging methods.