We present a comprehensive system for weather data visualization. Weather data are multivariate and contain vector fields formed by wind speed and direction. Several well-established visualization techniques such as parallel coordinates and polar systems are integrated into our system. We also develop various novel methods, including circular pixel bar charts embedded into polar systems, enhanced parallel coordinates with S-shape axis, and weighted complete graphs. Our system was used to analyze the air pollution problem in Hong Kong and some interesting patterns have been found.

Spectral feature extraction is a crucial procedure in automated spectral analysis. This procedure starts from the spectral data and produces informative and non-redundant features, facilitating the subsequent automated processing and analysis with machine-learning and data-mining techniques. In this paper, we present a new automated feature extraction method for astronomical spectra, with application in spectral classification and defective spectra recovery. The basic idea of our approach is to train a deep neural network to extract features of spectra with different levels of abstraction in different layers. The deep neural network is trained with a fast layer-wise learning algorithm in an analytical way without any iterative optimization procedure. We evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme on real-world spectral data. The results demonstrate that our method is superior regarding its comprehensive performance, and the computational cost is significantly lower than that for other methods. The proposed method can be regarded as a new valid alternative general-purpose feature extraction method for various tasks in spectral data analysis.

Discovering pulsars is a significant and meaningful research topic in the field of radio astronomy. With the advent of astronomical instruments, the volume and rate of data acquisition have grown exponentially. This development necessitates a focus on artificial intelligence (AI) technologies that can mine large astronomical data sets. Automatic pulsar candidate identification (APCI) can be considered as a task determining potential candidates for further investigation and eliminating the noise of radio-frequency interference and other non-pulsar signals. As reported in the existing literature, AI techniques, especially convolutional neural network (CNN)-based techniques, have been adopted for APCI. However, it is challenging to enhance the performance of CNN-based pulsar identification because only an extremely limited number of real pulsar samples exist, which results in a crucial class imbalance problem. To address these problems, we propose a framework that combines a deep convolution generative adversarial network (DCGAN) with a support vector machine (SVM). The DCGAN is used as a sample generation and feature learning model, and the SVM is adopted as the classifier for predicting the label of a candidate at the inference stage. The proposed framework is a novel technique, which not only can solve the class imbalance problem but also can learn the discriminative feature representations of pulsar candidates instead of computing hand-crafted features in the pre-processing steps. The proposed method can enhance the accuracy of the APCI, and the computer experiments performed on two pulsar data sets verified the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method.