Visual analytics for epidemiologists: understanding the interactions between age, time, and disease with multi-panel graphs.
<h4>Background</h4>Visual analytics, a technique aiding data analysis and decision making, is a novel tool that allows for a better understanding of the context of complex systems. Public health professionals can greatly benefit from this technique since context is integral in disease mo...
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| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
2011-02-01
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| Series: | PLoS ONE |
| Online Access: | https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0014683&type=printable |
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| Summary: | <h4>Background</h4>Visual analytics, a technique aiding data analysis and decision making, is a novel tool that allows for a better understanding of the context of complex systems. Public health professionals can greatly benefit from this technique since context is integral in disease monitoring and biosurveillance. We propose a graphical tool that can reveal the distribution of an outcome by time and age simultaneously.<h4>Methodology/principal findings</h4>We introduce and demonstrate multi-panel (MP) graphs applied in four different settings: U.S. national influenza-associated and salmonellosis-associated hospitalizations among the older adult population (≥65 years old), 1991-2004; confirmed salmonellosis cases reported to the Massachusetts Department of Public Health for the general population, 2004-2005; and asthma-associated hospital visits for children aged 0-18 at Milwaukee Children's Hospital of Wisconsin, 1997-2006. We illustrate trends and anomalies that otherwise would be obscured by traditional visualization techniques such as case pyramids and time-series plots.<h4>Conclusion/significance</h4>MP graphs can weave together two vital dynamics--temporality and demographics--that play important roles in the distribution and spread of diseases, making these graphs a powerful tool for public health and disease biosurveillance efforts. |
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| ISSN: | 1932-6203 |