Visualizing Uncertain Tropical Cyclone Predictions using Representative Samples from Ensembles of Forecast Tracks

Motion-Based Visual Encoding Can Improve Performance on Perceptual Tasks with Dynamic Time Series

Dynamic data visualizations can convey large amounts of information over time, such as using motion to depict changes in data values for multiple entities. Such dynamic displays put a demand on our visual processing capacities, yet our perception of motion is limited. Several techniques have been shown to improve the processing of dynamic displays. Staging the animation to sequentially show steps in a transition and tracing object movement by displaying trajectory histories can improve processing by reducing the cognitive load. In this paper, We examine the effectiveness of staging and tracing in dynamic displays. We showed participants animated line charts depicting the movements of lines and asked them to identify the line with the highest mean and variance. We manipulated the animation to display the lines with or without staging, tracing and history, and compared the results to a static chart as a control. Results showed that tracing and staging are preferred by participants, and improve their performance in mean and variance tasks respectively. They also preferred display time 3 times shorter when staging is used. Also, encoding animation speed with mean and variance in congruent tasks is associated with higher accuracy. These findings help inform real-world best practices for building dynamic displays. The supplementary materials can be found at https://osf.io/8c95v/.

EnConVis: A Unified Framework for Ensemble Contour Visualization

Ensemble simulation is a crucial method to handle potential uncertainty in modern simulation and has been widely applied in many disciplines. Many ensemble contour visualization methods have been introduced to facilitate ensemble data analysis. On the basis of deep exploration and summarization of existing techniques and domain requirements, we propose a unified framework of ensemble contour visualization, EnConVis (Ensemble Contour Visualization), which systematically combines state-of-the-art methods. We model ensemble contour visualization as a four-step pipeline consisting of four essential procedures: member filtering, point-wise modeling, uncertainty band extraction, and visual mapping. For each of the four essential procedures, we compare different methods they use, analyze their pros and cons, highlight research gaps, and attempt to fill them. Specifically, we add Kernel Density Estimation in the point-wise modeling procedure and multi-layer extraction in the uncertainty band extraction procedure. This step shows the ensemble data's details accurately and provides abstract levels. We also analyze existing methods from a global perspective. We investigate their mechanisms and compare their effects, on the basis of which, we offer selection guidelines for them. From the overall perspective of this framework, we find choices and combinations that have not been tried before, which can be well compensated by our method. Synthetic data and real-world data are leveraged to verify the efficacy of our method. Domain experts' feedback suggests that our approach helps them better understand ensemble data analysis.

Communicating Uncertainty in Digital Humanities Visualization Research

Due to their historical nature, humanistic data encompass multiple sources of uncertainty. While humanists are accustomed to handling such uncertainty with their established methods, they are cautious of visualizations that appear overly objective and fail to communicate this uncertainty. To design more trustworthy visualizations for humanistic research, therefore, a deeper understanding of its relation to uncertainty is needed. We systematically reviewed 126 publications from digital humanities literature that use visualization as part of their research process, and examined how uncertainty was handled and represented in their visualizations. Crossing these dimensions with the visualization type and use, we identified that uncertainty originated from multiple steps in the research process from the source artifacts to their datafication. We also noted how besides known uncertainty coping strategies, such as excluding data and evaluating its effects, humanists also embraced uncertainty as a separate dimension important to retain. By mapping how the visualizations encoded uncertainty, we identified four approaches that varied in terms of explicitness and customization. This work contributes with two empirical taxonomies of uncertainty and it's corresponding coping strategies, as well as with the foundation of a research agenda for uncertainty visualization in the digital humanities. Our findings further the synergy among humanists and visualization researchers, and ultimately contribute to the development of more trustworthy, uncertainty-aware visualizations.

Multiple Forecast Visualizations (MFVs): Trade-offs in Trust and Performance in Multiple COVID-19 Forecast Visualizations

The prevalence of inadequate SARS-COV-2 (COVID-19) responses may indicate a lack of trust in forecasts and risk communication. However, no work has empirically tested how multiple forecast visualization choices impact trust and task-based performance. The three studies presented in this paper ( N=1299) examine how visualization choices impact trust in COVID-19 mortality forecasts and how they influence performance in a trend prediction task. These studies focus on line charts populated with real-time COVID-19 data that varied the number and color encoding of the forecasts and the presence of best/worst-case forecasts. The studies reveal that trust in COVID-19 forecast visualizations initially increases with the number of forecasts and then plateaus after 6-9 forecasts. However, participants were most trusting of visualizations that showed less visual information, including a 95% confidence interval, single forecast, and grayscale encoded forecasts. Participants maintained high trust in intervals labeled with 50% and 25% and did not proportionally scale their trust to the indicated interval size. Despite the high trust, the 95% CI condition was the most likely to evoke predictions that did not correspond with the actual COVID-19 trend. Qualitative analysis of participants' strategies confirmed that many participants trusted both the simplistic visualizations and those with numerous forecasts. This work provides practical guides for how COVID-19 forecast visualizations influence trust, including recommendations for identifying the range where forecasts balance trade-offs between trust and task-based performance.

Impact of COVID-19 forecast visualizations on pandemic risk perceptions

People worldwide use SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) visualizations to make life and death decisions about pandemic risks. Understanding how these visualizations influence risk perceptions to improve pandemic communication is crucial. To examine how COVID-19 visualizations influence risk perception, we conducted two experiments online in October and December of 2020 (N = 2549) where we presented participants with 34 visualization techniques (available at the time of publication on the CDC’s website) of the same COVID-19 mortality data. We found that visualizing data using a cumulative scale consistently led to participants believing that they and others were at more risk than before viewing the visualizations. In contrast, visualizing the same data with a weekly incident scale led to variable changes in risk perceptions. Further, uncertainty forecast visualizations also affected risk perceptions, with visualizations showing six or more models increasing risk estimates more than the others tested. Differences between COVID-19 visualizations of the same data produce different risk perceptions, fundamentally changing viewers’ interpretation of information.

Examining Effort in 1D Uncertainty Communication Using Individual Differences in Working Memory and NASA-TLX

As uncertainty visualizations for general audiences become increasingly common, designers must understand the full impact of uncertainty communication techniques on viewers' decision processes. Prior work demonstrates mixed performance outcomes with respect to how individuals make decisions using various visual and textual depictions of uncertainty. Part of the inconsistency across findings may be due to an over-reliance on task accuracy, which cannot, on its own, provide a comprehensive understanding of how uncertainty visualization techniques support reasoning processes. In this work, we advance the debate surrounding the efficacy of modern 1D uncertainty visualizations by conducting converging quantitative and qualitative analyses of both the effort and strategies used by individuals when provided with quantile dotplots, density plots, interval plots, mean plots, and textual descriptions of uncertainty. We utilize two approaches for examining effort across uncertainty communication techniques: a measure of individual differences in working-memory capacity known as an operation span (OSPAN) task and self-reports of perceived workload via the NASA-TLX. The results reveal that both visualization methods and working-memory capacity impact participants' decisions. Specifically, quantile dotplots and density plots (i.e., distributional annotations) result in more accurate judgments than interval plots, textual descriptions of uncertainty, and mean plots (i.e., summary annotations). Additionally, participants' open-ended responses suggest that individuals viewing distributional annotations are more likely to employ a strategy that explicitly incorporates uncertainty into their judgments than those viewing summary annotations. When comparing quantile dotplots to density plots, this work finds that both methods are equally effective for low-working-memory individuals. However, for individuals with high-working-memory capacity, quantile dotplots evoke more accurate responses with less perceived effort. Given these results, we advocate for the inclusion of converging behavioral and subjective workload metrics in addition to accuracy performance to further disambiguate meaningful differences among visualization techniques.

The Science of Visual Data Communication: What Works

Effectively designed data visualizations allow viewers to use their powerful visual systems to understand patterns in data across science, education, health, and public policy. But ineffectively designed visualizations can cause confusion, misunderstanding, or even distrust-especially among viewers with low graphical literacy. We review research-backed guidelines for creating effective and intuitive visualizations oriented toward communicating data to students, coworkers, and the general public. We describe how the visual system can quickly extract broad statistics from a display, whereas poorly designed displays can lead to misperceptions and illusions. Extracting global statistics is fast, but comparing between subsets of values is slow. Effective graphics avoid taxing working memory, guide attention, and respect familiar conventions. Data visualizations can play a critical role in teaching and communication, provided that designers tailor those visualizations to their audience.

Multiple Hazard Uncertainty Visualization Challenges and Paths Forward

Making decisions with uncertainty is challenging for the general public, policymakers, and even highly trained scientists. Nevertheless, when faced with the need to respond to a potential hazard, people must make high-risk decisions with uncertainty. In some cases, people have to consider multiple hazards with various types of uncertainties. Multiple hazards can be interconnected by location, time, and/or environmental systems, and the hazards may interact, producing complex relationships among their associated uncertainties. The interaction between multiple hazards and their uncertainties can have nonlinear effects, where the resultant risk and uncertainty are greater than the sum of the risk and uncertainty associated with individual hazards. Effectively communicating the uncertainties related to such complicated systems should be a high priority because the frequency and variability of multiple hazard events due to climate change continue to increase. However, the communication of multiple hazard uncertainties and their interactions remains largely unexplored. The lack of practical guidance on conveying multiple hazard uncertainties is likely due in part to the field’s vast expanse, making it challenging to identify entry points. Here, we offer a perspective on three critical challenges related to uncertainty communication across various multiple hazard contexts to galvanize the research community. We advocate for systematic considerations of multiple hazard uncertainty communication that focus on trade-offs between complexity and factors, including mental effort, trust, and usability.

Uncertainty-Oriented Ensemble Data Visualization and Exploration using Variable Spatial Spreading

As an important method of handling potential uncertainties in numerical simulations, ensemble simulation has been widely applied in many disciplines. Visualization is a promising and powerful ensemble simulation analysis method. However, conventional visualization methods mainly aim at data simplification and highlighting important information based on domain expertise instead of providing a flexible data exploration and intervention mechanism. Trial-and-error procedures have to be repeatedly conducted by such approaches. To resolve this issue, we propose a new perspective of ensemble data analysis using the attribute variable dimension as the primary analysis dimension. Particularly, we propose a variable uncertainty calculation method based on variable spatial spreading. Based on this method, we design an interactive ensemble analysis framework that provides a flexible interactive exploration of the ensemble data. Particularly, the proposed spreading curve view, the region stability heat map view, and the temporal analysis view, together with the commonly used 2D map view, jointly support uncertainty distribution perception, region selection, and temporal analysis, as well as other analysis requirements. We verify our approach by analyzing a real-world ensemble simulation dataset. Feedback collected from domain experts confirms the efficacy of our framework.

GenerativeMap: Visualization and Exploration of Dynamic Density Maps via Generative Learning Model

The density map is widely used for data sampling, time-varying detection, ensemble representation, etc. The visualization of dynamic evolution is a challenging task when exploring spatiotemporal data. Many approaches have been provided to explore the variation of data patterns over time, which commonly need multiple parameters and preprocessing works. Image generation is a well-known topic in deep learning, and a variety of generating models have been promoted in recent years. In this paper, we introduce a general pipeline called GenerativeMap to extract dynamics of density maps by generating interpolation information. First, a trained generative model comprises an important part of our approach, which can generate nonlinear and natural results by implementing a few parameters. Second, a visual presentation is proposed to show the density change, which is combined with the level of detail and blue noise sampling for a better visual effect. Third, for dynamic visualization of large-scale density maps, we extend this approach to show the evolution in regions of interest, which costs less to overcome the drawback of the learning-based generative model. We demonstrate our method on different types of cases, and we evaluate and compare the approach from multiple aspects. The results help identify the effectiveness of our approach and confirm its applicability in different scenarios.