A Visual Data Science Solution for Visualization and Visual Analytics of Big Sequential Data

In the current era of big data, huge volumes of valuable data have been generated and collected at a rapid velocity from a wide variety of rich data sources. In recent years, the initiates of open data also led to the willingness of many government, researchers, and organizations to share their data and make them publicly accessible. An example of open big data is healthcare, disease and epidemiological data such as privacy-preserving statistics on patients who suffered from epidemic diseases like the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Analyzing these open big data can be for social good. For instance, analyzing and mining the disease statistics helps people to get a better understanding of the disease, which may inspire them to take part in preventing, detecting, controlling and combating the disease. As “a picture is worth a thousand words”, having the pictorial representation further enhances people’s understanding of the data and the corresponding results for the analysis and mining. Hence, in this paper, we present a visual data science solution for the visualization and visual analytics of big sequential data. We illustrate the ideas through the visualization and visual analytics of sequences of real-life COVID-19 epidemiological data. Our solution enables people to visualize COVID-19 epidemiological data and their temporal trends. It also allows people to visually analyze the data and discover relationships among popular features associated with the COVID-19 cases. Evaluation of these real-life sequential COVID-19 epidemiological data demonstrates the effectiveness of our visual data science solution in enhancing user experience in the visualization and visual analytics of big sequential data.