MizBee: A Multiscale Synteny Browser

In the field of comparative genomics, scientists seek to answer questions about evolution and genomic function by comparing the genomes of species to find regions of shared sequences. Conserve dsyntenic blocks are an important biological data abstraction for indicating regions of shared sequences. The goal of this work is to show multiple types of relationships at multiple scales in a way that is visually comprehensible in accordance with known perceptual principles. We present a task analysis for this domain where the fundamental questions asked by biologists can be understood by a characterization of relationships into the four types of proximity/location, size, orientation, and similarity/strength, and the four scales of genome, chromosome, block, and genomic feature. We also propose a new taxonomy of the design space for visually encoding conservation data. We present MizBee, a multiscale synteny browser with the unique property of providing interactive side-by-side views of the data across the range of scales supporting exploration of all of these relationship types. We conclude with case studies from two biologists who used MizBee to augment their previous automatic analysis work flow, providing anecdotal evidence about the efficacy of the system for the visualization of syntenic data, the analysis of conservation relationships, and the communication of scientific insights.     

Interactive visual analysis of families of function graphs

The analysis and exploration of multidimensional and multivariate data is still one of the most challenging areas in the field of visualization. In this paper, we describe an approach to visual analysis of an especially challenging set of problems that exhibit a complex internal data structure. We describe the interactive visual exploration and analysis of data that includes several (usually large) families of function graphs f_i(x, t). We describe analysis procedures and practical aspects of the interactive visual analysis specific to this type of data (with emphasis on the function graph characteristic of the data). We adopted the well-proven approach of multiple, linked views with advanced interactive brushing to assess the data. Standard views such as histograms, scatterplots, and parallel coordinates are used to jointly visualize data. We support iterative visual analysis by providing means to create complex, composite brushes that span multiple views and that are constructed using different combination schemes. We demonstrate that engineering applications represent a challenging but very applicable area for visual analytics. As a case study, we describe the optimization of a fuel injection system in diesel engines of passenger cars     

Brushing Moments in Interactive Visual Analysis

We present a systematic study of opportunities for the interactive visual analysis of multi‐dimensional scientific data that is based on the integration of statistical aggregations along selected independent data dimensions in a framework of coordinated multiple views (with linking and brushing). Traditional and robust estimates of the four statistical moments (mean, variance, skewness, and kurtosis) as well as measures of outlyingness are integrated in an iterative visual analysis process. Brushing particular statistics, the analyst can investigate data characteristics such as trends and outliers. We present a categorization of beneficial combinations of attributes in 2D scatterplots: (a) k^th vs. (k + 1)^th statistical moment of a traditional or robust estimate, (b) traditional vs. robust version of the same moment, (c) two different robust estimates of the same moment. We propose selected view transformations to iteratively construct this multitude of informative views as well as to enhance the depiction of the statistical properties in scatterplots and quantile plots. In the framework, we interrelate the original distributional data and the aggregated statistics, which allows the analyst to work with both data representations simultaneously. We demonstrate our approach in the context of two visual analysis scenarios of multi‐run climate simulations.     

Visual Analytics for the Exploration of Tumor Tissue Characterization

Tumors are heterogeneous tissues consisting of multiple regions with distinct characteristics. Characterization of these intra‐tumor regions can improve patient diagnosis and enable a better targeted treatment. Ideally, tissue characterization could be performed non‐invasively, using medical imaging data, to derive per voxel a number of features, indicative of tissue properties. However, the high dimensionality and complexity of this imaging‐derived feature space is prohibiting for easy exploration and analysis ‐ especially when clinical researchers require to associate observations from the feature space to other reference data, e.g., features derived from histopathological data. Currently, the exploratory approach used in clinical research consists of juxtaposing these data, visually comparing them and mentally reconstructing their relationships. This is a time consuming and tedious process, from which it is difficult to obtain the required insight. We propose a visual tool for: (1) easy exploration and visual analysis of the feature space of imaging‐derived tissue characteristics and (2) knowledge discovery and hypothesis generation and confirmation, with respect to reference data used in clinical research. We employ, as central view, a 2D embedding of the imaging‐derived features. Multiple linked interactive views provide functionality for the exploration and analysis of the local structure of the feature space, enabling linking to patient anatomy and clinical reference data. We performed an initial evaluation with ten clinical researchers. All participants agreed that, unlike current practice, the proposed visual tool enables them to identify, explore and analyze heterogeneous intra‐tumor regions and particularly, to generate and confirm hypotheses, with respect to clinical reference data.     

Cycle Plot Revisited: Multivariate Outlier Detection Using a Distance‐Based Abstraction

The cycle plot is an established and effective visualization technique for identifying and comprehending patterns in periodic time series, like trends and seasonal cycles. It also allows to visually identify and contextualize extreme values and outliers from a different perspective. Unfortunately, it is limited to univariate data. For multivariate time series, patterns that exist across several dimensions are much harder or impossible to explore. We propose a modified cycle plot using a distance‐based abstraction (Mahalanobis distance) to reduce multiple dimensions to one overview dimension and retain a representation similar to the original. Utilizing this distance‐based cycle plot in an interactive exploration environment, we enhance the Visual Analytics capacity of cycle plots for multivariate outlier detection. To enable interactive exploration and interpretation of outliers, we employ coordinated multiple views that juxtapose a distance‐based cycle plot with Cleveland's original cycle plots of the underlying dimensions. With our approach it is possible to judge the outlyingness regarding the seasonal cycle in multivariate periodic time series.     

Visualizing the Impact of Geographical Variations on Multivariate Clustering

Traditional multivariate clustering approaches are common in many geovisualization applications. These algorithms are used to define geodemographic profiles, ecosystems and various other land use patterns that are based on multivariate measures. Cluster labels are then projected onto a choropleth map to enable analysts to explore spatial dependencies and heterogeneity within the multivariate attributes. However, local variations in the data and choices of clustering parameters can greatly impact the resultant visualization. In this work, we develop a visual analytics framework for exploring and comparing the impact of geographical variations for multivariate clustering. Our framework employs a variety of graphical configurations and summary statistics to explore the spatial extents of clustering. It also allows users to discover patterns that can be concealed by traditional global clustering via several interactive visualization techniques including a novel drag & drop clustering difference view. We demonstrate the applicability of our framework over a demographics dataset containing quick facts about counties in the continental United States and demonstrate the need for analytical tools that can enable users to explore and compare clustering results over varying geographical features and scales.     

Hierarchical aggregation for efficient shape extraction

This paper presents an efficient framework which supports both automatic and interactive shape extraction from surfaces. Unlike most of the existing hierarchical shape extraction methods, which are based on computationally expensive top-down algorithms, our framework employs a fast bottom-up hierarchical method with multiscale aggregation. We introduce a geometric similarity measure, which operates at multiple scales and guarantees that a hierarchy of high-level features are automatically found through local adaptive aggregation. We also show that the aggregation process allows easy incorporation of user-specified constraints, enabling users to interactively extract features of interest. Both our automatic and the interactive shape extraction methods do not require explicit connectivity information, and thus are applicable to unorganized point sets. Additionally, with the hierarchical feature representation, we design a simple and effective method to perform partial shape matching, allowing efficient search of self-similar features across the entire surface. Experiments show that our methods robustly extract visually meaningful features and are significantly faster than related methods.     

A visualization system for space-time and multivariate patterns (VIS-STAMP)

The research reported here integrates computational, visual and cartographic methods to develop a geovisual analytic approach for exploring and understanding spatio-temporal and multivariate patterns. The developed methodology and tools can help analysts investigate complex patterns across multivariate, spatial and temporal dimensions via clustering, sorting and visualization. Specifically, the approach involves a self-organizing map, a parallel coordinate plot, several forms of reorderable matrices (including several ordering methods), a geographic small multiple display and a 2-dimensional cartographic color design method. The coupling among these methods leverages their independent strengths and facilitates a visual exploration of patterns that are difficult to discover otherwise. The visualization system we developed supports overview of complex patterns and through a variety of interactions, enables users to focus on specific patterns and examine detailed views. We demonstrate the system with an application to the IEEE InfoVis 2005 contest data set, which contains time-varying, geographically referenced and multivariate data for technology companies in the US     

Time Lattice: A Data Structure for the Interactive Visual Analysis of Large Time Series

Advances in technology coupled with the availability of low‐cost sensors have resulted in the continuous generation of large time series from several sources. In order to visually explore and compare these time series at different scales, analysts need to execute online analytical processing (OLAP) queries that include constraints and group‐by's at multiple temporal hierarchies. Effective visual analysis requires these queries to be interactive. However, while existing OLAP cube‐based structures can support interactive query rates, the exponential memory requirement to materialize the data cube is often unsuitable for large data sets. Moreover, none of the recent space‐efficient cube data structures allow for updates. Thus, the cube must be re‐computed whenever there is new data, making them impractical in a streaming scenario. We propose Time Lattice, a memory‐efficient data structure that makes use of the implicit temporal hierarchy to enable interactive OLAP queries over large time series. Time Lattice is a subset of a fully materialized cube and is designed to handle fast updates and streaming data. We perform an experimental evaluation which shows that the space efficiency of the data structure does not hamper its performance when compared to the state of the art. In collaboration with signal processing and acoustics research scientists, we use the Time Lattice data structure to design the Noise Profiler, a web‐based visualization framework that supports the analysis of noise from cities. We demonstrate the utility of Noise Profiler through a set of case studies.     

基于Movielens电影数据的可视分析

目前,随着电影数据逐渐被人们获取,关于电影数据的研究可以给人们带来很多启发。分析电影流派的演变规律,可以为导演提供电影题材建议;分析经济和电影之间的关系,可以找到电影演变的原因;研究高评分电影在时间上的规律,可以指导导演选择电影的上映时间。但是,由于电影包含电影名称、所属流派、评分等多重属性,一般的研究方法不足以发现并直观地呈现电影数据隐含的规律。用可视化与可视分析的方法分析电影数据,设计了一系列相互关联的可视化视图,从多个时间尺度角度分析电影流派的时间演变,通过增长率曲线图研究电影数量和经济的相关关系,并设计饼图集来发现高评分电影在时间、流派上的规律。     

Local statistics of retinal optic flow for self-motion through natural sceneries

Image analysis in the visual system is well adapted to the statistics of natural scenes. Investigations of natural image statistics have so far mainly focused on static features. The present study is dedicated to the measurement and the analysis of the statistics of optic flow generated on the retina during locomotion through natural environments. Natural locomotion includes bouncing and swaying of the head and eye movement reflexes that stabilize gaze onto interesting objects in the scene while walking. We investigate the dependencies of the local statistics of optic flow on the depth structure of the natural environment and on the ego-motion parameters. To measure these dependencies we estimate the mutual information between correlated data sets. We analyze the results with respect to the variation of the dependencies over the visual field, since the visual motions in the optic flow vary depending on visual field position. We find that retinal flow direction and retinal speed show only minor statistical interdependencies. Retinal speed is statistically tightly connected to the depth structure of the scene. Retinal flow direction is statistically mostly driven by the relation between the direction of gaze and the direction of ego-motion. These dependencies differ at different visual field positions such that certain areas of the visual field provide more information about ego-motion and other areas provide more information about depth. The statistical properties of natural optic flow may be used to tune the performance of artificial vision systems based on human imitating behavior, and may be useful for analyzing properties of natural vision systems.     

Cartogram visualization for nonlinear manifold learning models

Real-world applications of multivariate data analysis often stumble upon the barrier of interpretability. Simple data analysis methods are usually easy to interpret, but they risk providing poor data models. More involved methods may instead yield faithful data models, but limited interpretability. This is the case of linear and nonlinear methods for multivariate data visualization through dimensionality reduction. Even though the latter have provided some of the most exciting visualization developments, their practicality is hindered by the difficulty of explaining them in an intuitive manner. The interpretability, and therefore the practical applicability, of data visualization through nonlinear dimensionality reduction (NLDR) methods would improve if, first, we could accurately calculate the distortion introduced by these methods in the visual representation and, second, if we could faithfully reintroduce this distortion into such representation. In this paper, we describe a technique for the reintroduction of the distortion into the visualization space of NLDR models. It is based on the concept of density-equalizing maps, or cartograms, recently developed for the representation of geographic information. We illustrate it using Generative Topographic Mapping (GTM), a nonlinear manifold learning method that can provide both multivariate data visualization and a measure of the local distortion that the model generates. Although illustrated here with GTM, it could easily be extended to other NLDR visualization methods, provided a local distortion measure could be calculated. It could also serve as a guiding tool for interactive data visualization.     

TopicEye：一种基于可视化分析的探索来源#br# 不同话题的可交互方法

为了更好地支持不同语料源中话题的集中分析,提出一种可视化分析的方法,可将不同来源文本中相关或独立的话题进行紧密聚类,构成一幅话题全景图,实现高效地交互式话题分析。该方法首先采用相关话题建模的方法,从不同来源的文本中抽取话题,然后,提出一系列交互式的可视化方案,从不同的角度,清晰地展示每个话题的观点和话题之间的关系,使用户可以更深入地分析和理解随着时间的变化,不同来源的文本之间的关系和各自的特点。该可视化分析方案不仅是可交互的,而且能从不同的层次和粒度来表现文本话题之间的关系。最后,将该方法应用于3种来源的论文集,并与专家共同对其进行定性评估,通过对现实世界的案例研究,验证该方法的有效性和鲁棒性。     

Space‐in‐Time and Time‐in‐Space Self‐Organizing Maps for Exploring Spatiotemporal Patterns

Spatiotemporal data pose serious challenges to analysts in geographic and other domains. Owing to the complexity of the geospatial and temporal components, this kind of data cannot be analyzed by fully automatic methods but require the involvement of the human analyst's expertise. For a comprehensive analysis, the data need to be considered from two complementary perspectives: (1) as spatial distributions (situations) changing over time and (2) as profiles of local temporal variation distributed over space. In order to support the visual analysis of spatiotemporal data, we suggest a framework based on the “Self‐Organizing Map” (SOM) method combined with a set of interactive visual tools supporting both analytic perspectives. SOM can be considered as a combination of clustering and dimensionality reduction. In the first perspective, SOM is applied to the spatial situations at different time moments or intervals. In the other perspective, SOM is applied to the local temporal evolution profiles. The integrated visual analytics environment includes interactive coordinated displays enabling various transformations of spatiotemporal data and post‐processing of SOM results. The SOM matrix display offers an overview of the groupings of data objects and their two‐dimensional arrangement by similarity. This view is linked to a cartographic map display, a time series graph, and a periodic pattern view. The linkage of these views supports the analysis of SOM results in both the spatial and temporal contexts. The variable SOM grid coloring serves as an instrument for linking the SOM with the corresponding items in the other displays. The framework has been validated on a large dataset with real city traffic data, where expected spatiotemporal patterns have been successfully uncovered. We also describe the use of the framework for discovery of previously unknown patterns in 41‐years time series of 7 crime rate attributes in the states of the USA.     

Orchard: Exploring Multivariate Heterogeneous Networks on Mobile Phones

People are becoming increasingly sophisticated in their ability to navigate information spaces using search, hyperlinks, and visualization. But, mobile phones preclude the use of multiple coordinated views that have proven effective in the desktop environment (e.g., for business intelligence or visual analytics). In this work, we propose to model information as multivariate heterogeneous networks to enable greater analytic expression for a range of sensemaking tasks while suggesting a new, list-based paradigm with gestural navigation of structured information spaces on mobile phones. We also present a mobile application, called Orchard, which combines ideas from both faceted search and interactive network exploration in a visual query language to allow users to collect facets of interest during exploratory navigation. Our study showed that users could collect and combine these facets with Orchard, specifying network queries and projections that would only have been possible previously using complex data tools or custom data science.     

OpinionSeer: interactive visualization of hotel customer feedback

The rapid development of Web technology has resulted in an increasing number of hotel customers sharing their opinions on the hotel services. Effective visual analysis of online customer opinions is needed, as it has a significant impact on building a successful business. In this paper, we present OpinionSeer, an interactive visualization system that could visually analyze a large collection of online hotel customer reviews. The system is built on a new visualization-centric opinion mining technique that considers uncertainty for faithfully modeling and analyzing customer opinions. A new visual representation is developed to convey customer opinions by augmenting well-established scatterplots and radial visualization. To provide multiple-level exploration, we introduce subjective logic to handle and organize subjective opinions with degrees of uncertainty. Several case studies illustrate the effectiveness and usefulness of OpinionSeer on analyzing relationships among multiple data dimensions and comparing opinions of different groups. Aside from data on hotel customer feedback, OpinionSeer could also be applied to visually analyze customer opinions on other products or services.     

TMNVis: Visual analysis of evolution in temporal multivariate network at multiple granularities

Temporal (Dynamic) multivariate networks consist of objects and relationships with a variety of attributes, and the networks change over time. Exploring such kind of networks in visualization is of great significance and full of challenges as its time-varying and multivariate nature. Most of the existing dynamic network visualization techniques focus on the topological structure evolution lacking of exploration on the multivariate data (multiple attributes) thoroughly, and do not cover comprehensive analyses on multiple granularities. In this paper, we propose TMNVis, an interactive visualization system to explore the evolution of temporal multivariate network. Firstly we list a series of tasks on three granularities: global level, subgroup level and individual level. Secondly three main views, which rely mainly on timeline-based method while animation subsidiary, are designed to resolve the analysis tasks. Thirdly we design a series of flexible interactions and develop a prototype system. At last we verify the effectiveness and usefulness of TMNVis using a real-world academic collaboration data.     

HybridVis: An adaptive hybrid-scale visualization of multivariate graphs

Existing network visualizations support hierarchical exploration, which rely on user interactions to create and modify graph hierarchies based on the patterns in the data attributes. It will take a relatively long time for users to identify the impact of different attributes on the cluster structure. To address this problem, this paper proposes a visual analytical approach, called HybridVis, creating an interactive layout to reveal clusters of obvious characteristics on one or more attributes at different scales. HybridVis can help people gain social insight and better understand the roles of attributes within a cluster. First, an approximate optimal graph hierarchy based on an energy model is created, considering both data attributes and relationships among data items. Then a layout algorithm and a level-dependent perceptual view for multi-scale graphs are proposed to show the attribute-driven graph hierarchy. Several views, which interact with each other, are designed in HybridVis, including a graphical view of the relationships among clusters; a cluster tree revealing the cluster scales and the details of attributes on parallel coordinates augmented with histograms and interactions. From the meaningful and globally approximate optimal abstraction, users can navigate a large multivariate graph with an overview+detail to explore and rapidly find the potential correlations between the graph structure and the attributes of data items. Finally, experiments using two real world data sets are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods.