No Arabic abstract
This paper presents GestureMap, a visual analytics tool for gesture elicitation which directly visualises the space of gestures. Concretely, a Variational Autoencoder embeds gestures recorded as 3D skeletons on an interactive 2D map. GestureMap further integrates three computational capabilities to connect exploration to quantitative measures: Leveraging DTW Barycenter Averaging (DBA), we compute average gestures to 1) represent gesture groups at a glance; 2) compute a new consensus measure (variance around average gesture); and 3) cluster gestures with k-means. We evaluate GestureMap and its concepts with eight experts and an in-depth analysis of published data. Our findings show how GestureMap facilitates exploring large datasets and helps researchers to gain a visual understanding of elicited gesture spaces. It further opens new directions, such as comparing elicitations across studies. We discuss implications for elicitation studies and research, and opportunities to extend our approach to additional tasks in gesture elicitation.
Visual analytics for machine learning has recently evolved as one of the most exciting areas in the field of visualization. To better identify which research topics are promising and to learn how to apply relevant techniques in visual analytics, we systematically review 259 papers published in the last ten years together with representative works before 2010. We build a taxonomy, which includes three first-level categories: techniques before model building, techniques during model building, and techniques after model building. Each category is further characterized by representative analysis tasks, and each task is exemplified by a set of recent influential works. We also discuss and highlight research challenges and promising potential future research opportunities useful for visual analytics researchers.
Anomaly detection plays a key role in air quality analysis by enhancing situational awareness and alerting users to potential hazards. However, existing anomaly detection approaches for air quality analysis have their own limitations regarding parameter selection (e.g., need for extensive domain knowledge), computational expense, general applicability (e.g., require labeled data), interpretability, and the efficiency of analysis. Furthermore, the poor quality of collected air quality data (inconsistently formatted and sometimes missing) also increases the difficulty of analysis substantially. In this paper, we systematically formulate design requirements for a system that can solve these limitations and then propose AQEyes, an integrated visual analytics system for efficiently monitoring, detecting, and examining anomalies in air quality data. In particular, we propose a unified end-to-end tunable machine learning pipeline that includes several data pre-processors and featurizers to deal with data quality issues. The pipeline integrates an efficient unsupervised anomaly detection method that works without the use of labeled data and overcomes the limitations of existing approaches. Further, we develop an interactive visualization system to visualize the outputs from the pipeline. The system incorporates a set of novel visualization and interaction designs, allowing analysts to visually examine air quality dynamics and anomalous events in multiple scales and from multiple facets. We demonstrate the performance of this pipeline through a quantitative evaluation and show the effectiveness of the visualization system using qualitative case studies on real-world datasets.
The automated analysis of digital human communication data often focuses on specific aspects like content or network structure in isolation, while classical communication research stresses the importance of a holistic analysis approach. This work aims to formalize digital communication analysis and investigate how classical results can be leveraged as part of visually interactive systems, which offers new analysis opportunities to allow for less biased, skewed, or incomplete results. For this, we construct a conceptual framework and design space based on the existing research landscape, technical considerations, and communication research that describes the properties, capabilities, and composition of such systems through 30 criteria in four analysis dimensions. We make the case how visual analytics principles are uniquely suited for a more holistic approach by tackling the automation complexity and leverage domain knowledge, paving the way to generate design guidelines for building such approaches. Our framework provides a common language and description of communication analysis systems to support existing research, highlights relevant design areas while promoting and supporting the mutual exchange between researchers. Additionally, our framework identifies existing gaps and highlights opportunities in research areas that are worth investigating further. With this contribution, we pave the path for the formalization of digital communication analysis through visual analytics.
Many visual analytics systems allow users to interact with machine learning models towards the goals of data exploration and insight generation on a given dataset. However, in some situations, insights may be less important than the production of an accurate predictive model for future use. In that case, users are more interested in generating of diverse and robust predictive models, verifying their performance on holdout data, and selecting the most suitable model for their usage scenario. In this paper, we consider the concept of Exploratory Model Analysis (EMA), which is defined as the process of discovering and selecting relevant models that can be used to make predictions on a data source. We delineate the differences between EMA and the well-known term exploratory data analysis in terms of the desired outcome of the analytic process: insights into the data or a set of deployable models. The contributions of this work are a visual analytics system workflow for EMA, a user study, and two use cases validating the effectiveness of the workflow. We found that our system workflow enabled users to generate complex models, to assess them for various qualities, and to select the most relevant model for their task.
Communication consists of both meta-information as well as content. Currently, the automated analysis of such data often focuses either on the network aspects via social network analysis or on the content, utilizing methods from text-mining. However, the first category of approaches does not leverage the rich content information, while the latter ignores the conversation environment and the temporal evolution, as evident in the meta-information. In contradiction to communication research, which stresses the importance of a holistic approach, both aspects are rarely applied simultaneously, and consequently, their combination has not yet received enough attention in automated analysis systems. In this work, we aim to address this challenge by discussing the difficulties and design decisions of such a path as well as contribute CommAID, a blueprint for a holistic strategy to communication analysis. It features an integrated visual analytics design to analyze communication networks through dynamics modeling, semantic pattern retrieval, and a user-adaptable and problem-specific machine learning-based retrieval system. An interactive multi-level matrix-based visualization facilitates a focused analysis of both network and content using inline visuals supporting cross-checks and reducing context switches. We evaluate our approach in both a case study and through formative evaluation with eight law enforcement experts using a real-world communication corpus. Results show that our solution surpasses existing techniques in terms of integration level and applicability. With this contribution, we aim to pave the path for a more holistic approach to communication analysis.