An animated and interactive interface for visualizing dynamics of air quality change

Feng Qi, Assistant ProfessorDept. of Geology and MeteorologyKean University, NJ

April 09, 2009

The problem

Large amounts of data are being collected for local environmental monitoring and through funded research projects to monitor and model environmental qualities at various scales.

Time series data Present results

To expert? To the public, common audience

Traditional presentations of results

Traditional presentations of resultsTSP = 136.44684 + 24.52080 spr_ind + 15.20418 d_50 – 64.85563 wind_high – 37.85891 wind_low – 0.85512 Humidity + 9.45595 Precipitation – 0.00174 NorthBoundDiesel + 2.35774 day_ind + 19.21703 sum_ind – 0.00052981 TotalGasoline

Traditional presentations of results

Key words: Interesting? Engaging? Simple? Easy?

Key words: Public communication

Simple Animation Interaction

Animation

Eye-candy only?Our ‘eye-brain system is finely tuned to

seeing and understanding motion and change’.

Help generate new insights into dynamic processes that can be difficult with statistical analysis or static visualizations

Engage audienceReaders go into the map, especially if

interactions are allowed

Air quality data visualization

Key: simple, easy, fun, … Considerations:

Large amount of dataAnimation is good, and can represent lots of

data!However, we have very limited, short-term

visual memory---we can only absorb very limited information from visual stimuli

And if there’re multiple variables……

Air quality data visualization

Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) methodsTemporal brushingTemporal re-expression (DiBiase)Cross-variable referencingBenchmarking (Harrower)Google finance charts……

To help common users ‘distill’ information (knowledge discovery by common users)

The animated sequenceThe animated sequence

The interactive time series interfaceThe interactive time series interface

Facilitate Knowledge discovery

Data PreprocessingOutlier detectionFeature selection

Data Mining Knowledge Consolidation Information Presentation

Facilitate Model Validation