Analytical platform for socio-economic studies

Started in natural sciences, the high demand for analyzing a vast amount of complex data reached suchresearch areas as economics and social sciences. Big Data methods and technologies provide newefficient tools for research. In this paper, we discuss the main principles and architecture of the digitalanalytical platform aimed to support socio-economic applications. Integrating specific open-sourcesolutions, the platform intended to cover full-cycle data analysis and machine learning experiments,from data gathering to visualization. One of the system's primary goals is to deliver the advantage ofthe cloud and distributed computing and GPU accelerators with Big Data analysis techniques. Theauthors present the approach of building the platform from low-level services such as storage, virtualinfrastructure, pass-through authentication, up to data flows processing, analysis experiments, andresults representation.