Nowadays, huge volume of air quality data provides unprecedented opportunities for analyzing pollution. However, due to the high complexity, most traditional analytical methods focus on abstracting data, so these techniques discard the original structure and limit the understanding of the results. Visual analysis is a powerful technique for exploring unknown patterns since it retains the details of the original data and gives visual feedback to users. In this paper, we focus on air quality data and propose the AirInsight design, an interactive visual analytic system for recognizing, exploring, and summarizing regular patterns, as well as detecting, classifying, and interpreting abnormal cases. Based on the time-varying and multivariate features of air quality data, a dimension reduction method Composite Least Square Projection (CLSP) is proposed, which allows appreciating and interpreting the data patterns in the context of attributes. On the basis of the observed regular patterns, multiple abnormal cases are further detected, including the multivariate anomalies by the proposed Noise Hierarchical Clustering (NHC) method, abruptly changing timestamps by Time diversity (TD) indicator, and cities with unique patterns by the Geographical Surprise (GS) measure. Moreover, we combine TD and GS to group anomalies based on their underlying spatiotemporal correlations. AirInsight includes multiple coordinated views and rich interactive functions to provide contextual information from different aspects and facilitate a comprehensive understanding. In particular, a pair of glyphs are designed that provide a visual representation of the temporal variation in air quality conditions for a user-selected city. Experiments show that CLSP improves the accuracy of Least Square Projection (LSP) and that NHC has the ability to separate noises. Meanwhile, several case studies and task-based user evaluation demonstrate that our system is effective and practical for exploring and interpreting multivariate spatiotemporal patterns and anomalies in air quality data.

Uncertainty analysis of a time-varying ensemble vector field is a challenging topic in geoscience. Due to the complex data structure, the uncertainty of a time-varying ensemble vector field is hard to quantify and analyze. Measuring the differences between pathlines is an effective way to compute the uncertainty. However, existing metrics are not accurate enough or are sensitive to outliers; thus, a comprehensive tool for the further analysis of the uncertainty of transport patterns is required. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for quantifying and analyzing the uncertainty of an ensemble vector field. Based on the classical edit distance on real sequence (EDR) method, a robust and accurate metric was proposed to measure the pathline uncertainty. Considering the spatial continuity, we computed the transport variance of the neighborhood of a location, and evaluated the uncertainty correlation between each location and its neighborhood by using the local Moran’s I. Based on the proposed uncertainty measurements, a visual analysis system called UP-Vis (uncertainty pathline visualization) was developed to interactively explore the uncertainty. It provides an overview of the uncertainty and supports detailed exploration of transport patterns at a selected location, and allows for the comparison of transport patterns between a location and its neighborhood. Through pathline clustering, the major trends of the ensemble pathline at a location were extracted. Moreover, a glyph was designed to intuitively display the transport direction and diverging degree of each cluster. For the uncertainty analysis of the neighborhood, a comparison view was designed to compare the transport patterns between a location and its neighborhood in detail. A synthetic data set and weather simulation data set were used in our experiments. The evaluation and case studies demonstrated that the proposed framework can measure the uncertainty effectively and help users to comprehensively explore uncertainty transport patterns.

Bus route planning is a complex application problem within the transportation domain, aiming to identify the best route among numerous candidate solutions. Despite existing research significantly reducing the exploration space of solutions, planners still face challenges in further exploring optimal route planning solutions. Specifically, the diversity of route attributes increases the complexity of determining their impact, such as the variety and quantity of reachable points of interest. Therefore, we present BRPVis, an interactive visual analytics system designed to assist bus route planners in exploring optimal solutions through multi-level visualization and rich interaction design. Furthermore, we propose a human-machine collaborative multicriteria decision-making method, which quantitatively analyzes the weights of route attributes while incorporating interactive feedback mechanisms to support personalized route exploration. Based on exploration using real-world traffic datasets, three case studies conducted with domain experts demonstrate that BRPVis effectively provides decision support for bus route planning tasks.