Data Science in an Agent-Based Simulation World

In data science education, the importance of learning to solve real-world problems has been argued. However, there are two issues with this approach: (1) it is very costly to prepare multiple real-world problems (using real data) according to the learning objectives, and (2) the learner must suddenly tackle complex real-world problems immediately after learning from a textbook using ideal data. To solve these issues, this paper proposes data science teaching material that uses agent-based simulation (ABS). The proposed teaching material consists of an ABS model and an ABS story. To solve issue 1, the scenario of the problem can be changed according to the learning objectives by setting the appropriate parameters of the ABS model. To solve issue 2, the difficulty level of the tasks can be adjusted by changing the description in the ABS story. We show that, by using this teaching material, the learner can simulate the typical tasks performed by a data scientist in a step-by-step manner (causal inference, data understanding, hypothesis building, data collection, data wrangling, data analysis, and hypothesis testing). The teaching material described in this paper focuses on causal inference as the learning objectives and infectious diseases as the model theme for ABS, but ABS is used as a model to reproduce many types of social phenomena, and its range of expression is extremely wide. Therefore, we expect that the proposed teaching material will inspire the construction of teaching material for various objectives in data science education.