Sanjana Srabanti

Probability distributions are omnipresent in data analysis. They are often used to model the natural uncertainty present in real phenomena or to describe the properties of a data set. Designing efficient visual metaphors to convey probability distributions is, however, a difficult problem. This fact is especially true for geographical data, where conveying the spatial context constrains the design space. While many different alternatives have been proposed to solve this problem, they focus on representing data variability. However, they are not designed to support spatial analytical tasks involving probability quantification. The present work aims to adapt recent non-spatial approaches to the geographical context, in order to support probability quantification tasks. We also present a user study that compares the efficiency of these approaches in terms of both accuracy and usability.

The annual incidence of head and neck cancers (HNC) worldwide is more than 550,000 cases, with around 300,000 deaths each year. However, the incidence rates and disease-characteristics of HNC differ between treatment centers and different populations, due to undetermined reasons, which may or not include socioeconomic factors. The multi-faceted and multi-variate nature of the data in the context of the emerging field of health disparities research makes automated analysis impractical. Hence, we present a visual analysis approach to explore the health disparities in the data of HNC patients from two different cohorts at two cancer care centers. Our approach integrates data from multiple sources, including census data and city data, with custom visual encodings and with a nearest neighbor approach. Our design, created in collaboration with oncology experts, makes it possible to analyze the patients' demographic, disease characteristics, treatments and outcomes, and to make significant comparisons of these two cohorts and of individual patients. We evaluate this approach through two case studies performed with domain experts. The results demonstrate that this visual analysis approach successfully accomplishes the goal of comparing two cohorts in terms of different significant factors, and can provide insights into the main source of health disparities between the two centers.

The spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and its contagious disease COVID-19 has impacted countries to an extent not seen since the 1918 flu pandemic. In the absence of an effective vaccine and as cases surge worldwide, governments were forced to adopt measures to inhibit the spread of the disease. To reduce its impact and to guide policy planning and resource allocation, researchers have been developing models to forecast the infectious disease. Ensemble models, by aggregating forecasts from multiple individual models, have been shown to be a useful forecasting method. However, these models can still provide less-than-adequate forecasts at higher spatial resolutions. In this paper, we built COVID-19 EnsembleVis, a web-based interactive visual interface that allows the assessment of the errors of ensembles and individual models by enabling users to effortlessly navigate through and compare the outputs of models considering their space and time dimensions. COVID-19 EnsembleVis enables a more detailed understanding of uncertainty and the range of forecasts generated by individual models.