Evaluating the Alignment of a Data Analysis between Analyst and Audience

Abstract: A challenge that data analysts face is building a data analysis that is useful for a given consumer. Previously, we defined a set of principles for describing data analyses that can be used to create a data analysis and to characterize the variation between analyses. Here, we introduce a concept that we call the alignment of a data analysis between the data analyst and a consumer. We define a successfully aligned data analysis as the matching of principles between the analyst and the consumer for whom the analysis is developed. In this paper, we propose a statistical model for evaluating the alignment of a data analysis and describe some of its properties. We argue that this framework provides a language for characterizing alignment and can be used as a guide for practicing data scientists and students in data science courses for how to build better data analyses.