Analyzing origin-destination flows is an important problem that has been extensively investigated in several scientific fields, particularly by the visualization community. The problem becomes especially challenging when involving massive data, demanding mechanisms such as data aggregation and interactive filtering to make the exploratory process doable. However, data aggregation tends to smooth out certain patterns, and deciding which data should be filtered is not straightforward. In this work, we propose ORDENA, a visual analytic tool to explore origin and destination data. ORDENA is built upon a simple and intuitive scatter plot where the horizontal and vertical axes correspond to origins and destinations. Therefore, each origin-destination flow is represented as a point in the scatter plot. How the points are organized in the plot layout reveals important spatial phenomena present in the data. Moreover, ORDENA provides explainability resources that allow users to better understand the relation between origin-destination flows and associated attributes. We illustrate ORDENA's effectiveness in a set of case studies, which have also been elaborated in collaboration with domain experts. The proposed tool has also been evaluated by domain experts not involved in its development, which provided quite positive feedback about ORDENA.
翻译:分析起点-终点流是多个科学领域,尤其是可视化社区广泛研究的重要问题。当涉及海量数据时,该问题变得尤为复杂,需要数据聚合和交互式过滤等机制以使探索过程可行。然而,数据聚合往往会平滑掉某些模式,而决定应过滤哪些数据也并非易事。本研究提出ORDENA——一种用于探索起点与终点数据的可视分析工具。ORDENA构建于简洁直观的散点图之上,其横纵轴分别对应起点与终点。因此,每个起点-终点流在散点图中表示为一个点。点在绘图布局中的组织方式揭示了数据中存在的关键空间现象。此外,ORDENA提供可解释性资源,使用户能更好地理解起点-终点流与关联属性之间的关系。我们通过一系列案例研究展示了ORDENA的有效性,这些案例均与领域专家合作完成。该工具还接受了未参与开发的领域专家评估,获得了相当积极的反馈。