Interactive visualization and topology-based analysis of large-scale time-varying remote-sensing data: challenges and opportunities

We show that the framework of topological data analysis can be extended from metrics to general Bregman divergences, widening the scope of possible applications. Examples are the Kullback-Leibler divergence, which is commonly used for comparing text and images, and the Itakura-Saito divergence, popular for speech and sound. In particular, we prove that appropriately generalized Cech and Delaunay (alpha) complexes capture the correct homotopy type, namely that of the corresponding union of Bregman balls. Consequently, their filtrations give the correct persistence diagram, namely the one generated by the uniformly growing Bregman balls. Moreover, we show that unlike the metric setting, the filtration of Vietoris-Rips complexes may fail to approximate the persistence diagram. We propose algorithms to compute the thus generalized Cech, Vietoris-Rips and Delaunay complexes and experimentally test their efficiency. Lastly, we explain their surprisingly good performance by making a connection with discrete Morse theory.

In this study, an experiment is conducted to measure the performance in speed and accuracy of interactive visualizations. A platform for interactive data visualizations was implemented using Django, D3, and Angular. Using this platform, a questionnaire was designed to measure a difference in performance between interactive and noninteractive data visualizations. In this questionnaire consisting of 12 questions, participants were given tasks in which they had to identify trends or patterns. Other tasks were directed at comparing and selecting algorithms with a certain outcome based on visualizations. All tasks were performed on high content screening data sets with the help of visualizations. The difference in time to carry out tasks and accuracy of performance was measured between a group viewing interactive visualizations and a group viewing noninteractive visualizations. The study shows a significant advantage in time and accuracy in the group that used interactive visualizations over the group that used noninteractive visualizations. In tasks comparing results of different algorithms, a significant decrease in time was observed in using interactive visualizations over noninteractive visualizations.

In this paper we present a method for interactive high-quality visualization of large and time-varying 3D unstructured data from particle simulations.

Biomedical visualizations are key to accessing biomedical knowledge and detecting new patterns in large datasets. Interactive visualizations are essential for biomedical data scientists and are omnipresent in data analysis software and data portals. Without appropriate descriptions, these visualizations are not accessible to all people with blindness and low vision, who often rely on screen reader accessibility technologies to access visual information on digital devices. Screen readers require descriptions to convey image content. However, many images lack informative descriptions due to unawareness and difficulty writing such descriptions. Describing complex and interactive visualizations, like genomics data visualizations, is even more challenging. Automatic generation of descriptions could be beneficial, yet current alt text generating models are limited to basic visualizations and cannot be used for genomics. We present AltGosling, an automated description generation tool focused on interactive data visualizations of genome-mapped data, created with the grammar-based genomics toolkit Gosling. The logic-based algorithm of AltGosling creates various descriptions including a tree-structured navigable panel. We co-designed AltGosling with a blind screen reader user (co-author). We show that AltGosling outperforms state-of-the-art large language models and common image-based neural networks for alt text generation of genomics data visualizations. As a first of its kind in genomic research, we lay the groundwork to increase accessibility in the field. The source code, examples, and interactive demo are accessible under the MIT License at https://github.com/gosling-lang/altgosling. The package is available at https://www.npmjs.com/package/altgosling.

Persistent homology is a fundamental tool in topological data analysis used for the most diverse applications. Information captured by persistent homology is commonly visualized using scatter plots representations. Despite being widely adopted, such a visualization technique limits user understanding and is prone to misinterpretation. This article proposes a new approach for the efficient computation of persistence cycles, a geometric representation of the features captured by persistent homology. We illustrate the importance of rendering persistence cycles when analyzing scalar fields, and we discuss the advantages that our approach provides compared to other techniques in topology-based visualization. We provide an efficient implementation of our approach based on discrete Morse theory, as a new module for the Topology Toolkit. We show that our implementation has comparable performance with respect to state-of-the-art toolboxes while providing a better framework for visually analyzing persistent homology information.

A growing area of mathematics topological data analysis (TDA) uses fundamental concepts of topology to analyze complex, high-dimensional data. A topological network represents the data, and the TDA uses the network to analyze the shape of the data and identify features in the network that correspond to patterns in the data. These patterns extract knowledge from the data. TDA provides a framework to advance machine learning’s ability to understand and analyze large, complex data. This paper provides background information about TDA, TDA applications for large data sets, and details related to the investigation and implementation of existing tools and environments.

Data clustering is an important technique for data visualization and statistical data analysis. Using data clustering technique for geo-located data analysis and visualization has been shown to be useful in many practical domains. Although there are numerous studies for data clustering algorithms, the implementations and applications based on these algorithms are rare and inadequate, especially for web-based data visualization services. In this research, a new web-based interactive data clustering prototype is proposed for geo-located data visualization. The necessary web-based infrastructure for geo-located data analysis and visualization is designed and implemented at first. And then the new interactive data clustering prototype using multi-dimensional K-Means algorithm is implemented on the existing infrastructure. In order to assess whether the new prototype can contribute meaningfully to architectural design and urban studies, qualified users with urban study or architectural backgrounds are invited to use the prototype and then make their comments and evaluations. To make it clear how this new prototype might apply in real world settings, an application scenario in which the user might interact with the prototype is provided and analyzed.

This paper focuses on interactive data visualization techniques and their applications in healthcare systems. Interactive data visualization is a collection of techniques translating data from its numeric format to graphic presentation dynamically for easy understanding and visual impact. Compared to conventional static data visualization techniques, interactive data visualization techniques allow users to self-explore the entire data set by instant slice and dice, quick switching among multiple data sources. Adjustable granularity of interactive data visualization allows for both detailed micro information and aggregated macro information displayed in a single chart. Animated transition adds extra visual impact that describes how system transits from one state to another. When applied to healthcare system, interactive visualization techniques are useful in areas such as information integration, flow or trajectory presentation and location related visualization, etc. In this paper, three case studies are shared to illustrate how interactive data visualization techniques are applied to various aspects of healthcare systems. The first case study shows a pathway visualization representing longitudinal disease progression of a patient cohort. The second case study shows a dashboard profiling different patient cohorts from multiple perspectives. The third case study shows an interactive map illustrating patient geographical distribution at adjustable granularity. All three case studies illustrate that interactive data visualization techniques help quick information access, fast knowledge sharing and better decision making in healthcare system.

The curse of dimensionality, i.e., the fact that feature spaces of increasing dimensionality with finite sample sizes tend to be empty, has given incentive to a plethora of research activities in various disciplines and diverse application fields, e.g., statistics or neural networks. Three major application fields are multivariate data classification, data analysis and data visualization. In this contribution, methods for dimensionality reduction from three decades of interdisciplinary research are browsed and their applicability in the above application domains is briefly discussed. Complementing techniques for ensuing interactive data visualization, data navigation and visual exploratory data analysis are presented, which exploit the remarkable human perceptive and associative capabilities for interactive visual exploratory data analysis and systematic recognition system design. The main focus of this paper is on the comparison of feature selection and feature extraction techniques and the potential benefit of their combination. Further, the interesting implications of dimensionality reduction for VLSI design and related area and power consumption are pointed out.

There is a rising trend of data analysis and visualization tasks being performed on a tablet device. Apps with interactive data visualization capabilities are available for a wide variety of domains. We investigate whether users grasp how to effectively interpret and interact with visualizations. We conducted a detailed user evaluation to study the abilities of individuals with respect to analyzing data on a tablet through an interactive visualization app. Based upon the results of the user evaluation, we find that most subjects performed well at understanding and interacting with simple visualizations, specifically tables and line charts. A majority of the subjects struggled with identifying interactive widgets, recognizing interactive widgets with overloaded functionality, and understanding visualizations which do not display data for sorted attributes. Based on our study, we identify guidelines for designers and developers of mobile data visualization apps that include recommendations for effective data representation and interaction.

SummaryPathway analysis is widely used in genomics and omics research, but the data visualization has been highly limited in function, pathway coverage and data format. Here, we develop SBGNview a comprehensive R package to address these needs. By adopting the standard SBGN format, SBGNview greatly extend the coverage of pathway-based analysis and data visualization to essentially all major pathway databases beyond KEGG, including 5200 reference pathways and over 3000 species. In addition, SBGNview substantially extends or exceeds current tools (esp. Pathview) in both design and function, including standard input format (SBGN), high-quality output graphics (SVG format) convenient for both interpretation and further update, and flexible and open-end workflow for iterative editing and interactive visualization (Highlighter module). In addition to pathway analysis and data visualization, SBGNview provides essential infrastructure for SBGN data manipulation and processing.Availability and implementationThe data underlying this article are available as part of the SBGNview package is available on both GitHub and Bioconductor: https://github.com/datapplab/SBGNview, https://bioconductor.org/packages/SBGNview.Supplementary informationSupplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Denis Diderot, the great Encyclopédiste (1713–1784)

The detection of anomalous events in large multivariate data is sought in many domains. Analysis of data is an important fraud detection procedure in detecting suspicious events and prevent attempts to defraud. While now the data is becoming more complicated and difficult as data scales and complexities increase than ever before, the rich insights within the data may be difficult to identify by traditional means and often remain hidden. People require powerful tools to extract valid conclusions from the data while maintaining trustworthy and interpretable results. Hence, various fraud detection approaches have started to exploit Visual Analytics (VA) techniques to reveal the hidden knowledge in such fraudulent activities. Interactive data visualization tools have substantial potential for making the detection of fraudulent transactions more efficient and effective by allowing the investigator to change the representation of data from text and numeric into graphics and filter out subsets of transactions for further fraud investigation. However, little research to date has directly examined the efficacy of data visualization techniques for fraud detection especially telecommunication fraud. In this paper, we present an overview of several fraud detection solutions that use data visualization techniques to detect fraudulent transactions in the telecommunication domain. The paper concludes by discussing how academic research might proceed in investigating the efficacy of interactive data visualization tools for fraud detection.

Background: A key strength of population sciences and epidemiology is the breadth and depth of the data these studies, especially prospective cohorts, collect over time. However, publications from and websites of these studies tend to present collapsed or aggregate data in traditional tables, often underestimating the true complexity of information in those data. One goal of the NIH Strategic Plan for Data Science is to “support the development and dissemination of advanced data management, analytics, and visualization tools.” We recently developed a robust, innovative, and scalable data visualization environment for the California Teachers Study (CTS), a prospective cancer epidemiology cohort. Methods: We identified the need to eliminate the practice of storing CTS data in a collection of disparate data silos and constructed a data warehouse to compile two decades of study data, eliminating additional harmonization steps. We then developed a data commons, a remotely accessible environment where cohort data could be utilized by our researchers and study collaborators. This allowed questionnaire-based data, cancer registry information, and hospitalization and mortality data from our study participants to be easily accessed in a secure environment. Serving as a single unified source of information, the data warehouse, coupled with the industry-leading data visualization tool Tableau, was configured using the following key epidemiologic cohort activities: reports, cohort selection, calculated values, and exploring and transforming data variables for analysis. Results: With the ability to sort and filter on specific covariates we can define subsets of populations for cohort selection and endpoint-specific analysis. Using interactive reports with drags and drops, and creating calculated variables within Tableau, gives us the ability to visualize time between event data, such as time from study entry to a cancer diagnosis, multiple cancer diagnoses, hospitalizations, or mortality without requiring programmatic back-end coding. Conclusion: The creation of a data warehouse and data commons has given the CTS the ability to visualize information about the demographics and health-related patterns of our study participants, leading to faster answers to complex questions about our data. The interactive data visualizations that we have created allow users the ability to identify new patterns easily, and drill down into the data for a more detailed look. Defining analytic populations through cohort selection and adding geospatial data to our data warehouse has already resulted in the discovery of new patterns that had been unidentified before—simply by providing the same information but utilizing a more accessible and innovative approach to presenting it. As epidemiology uses and shares more of its data, it’s essential to help the widest possible community understand those data in detail. Data visualization can provide specific benefits to key, essential population sciences research activities. Citation Format: Nadia T. Chung, James V. Lacey Jr., Emma Spielfogel, Paul Hughes, Sandeep Chandra, Elena Martinez, Jennifer Benbow. Opportunities for and benefits of incorporating data visualization in population sciences [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the AACR Special Conference on Modernizing Population Sciences in the Digital Age; 2019 Feb 19-22; San Diego, CA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2020;29(9 Suppl):Abstract nr A01.

Data visualization and data mining are transdisciplinary tools for predictive and descriptive analytics. This presentation shows the abundance of data visualization tools currently available that are applicable for multi-disciplinary data. Some examples of visualization are presented as applied for multi-disciplines. Results of applying the most commonly used data visualization tools of Tableau [1] and Power BI [2] are presented as preliminary outputs of a funded Seed Money Grant that applies data for transmissible diseases for humans and also plant pathology. Tableau Software, LLC is an American interactive data visualization software company focused on business intelligence and can be used across all disciplines. Tableau products query relational databases, online analytical processing cubes, cloud databases, and spreadsheets to generate graph-type data visualizations.[1] Power BI (Business Intelligence) is a suite of business analytics tools developed by Microsoft that is widely used across various industries for business reporting, data analysis, and decision-making. [2] Future directions of this research are discussed that include using other data mining and visualization methods such as image processing techniques for applications to data for plant pathology and human diseases.