Big Data Visualization and Visual Analytics of COVID-19 Data
Carson K. Leung, Yubo Chen, Calvin S. H. Hoi, Siyuan Shang, Yan Wen, Alfredo Cuzzocrea
Abstract
In the current era of big data, a huge amount of data has been generated and collected from a wide variety of rich data sources. Embedded in these big data are useful information and valuable knowledge. An example is healthcare and epidemiological data such as data related to patients who suffered from epidemic diseases like the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Knowledge discovered from these epidemiological data helps researchers, epidemiologists and policy makers to get a better understanding of the disease, which may inspire them to come up ways to detect, control and combat the disease. As “a picture is worth a thousand words”, having methods to visualize and visually analyze these big data makes it easily to comprehend the data and the discovered knowledge. In this paper, we present a big data visualization and visual analytics tool for visualizing and analyzing COVID-19 epidemiological data. The tool helps users to get a better understanding of information about the confirmed cases of COVID-19. Although this tool is designed for visualization and visual analytics of epidemiological data, it is applicable to visualization and visual analytics of big data from many other real-life applications and services.