ISSS608 2016-17T3 Group15 Report
ISSS608 Visual Analytics and Applications
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Characterizing Pandemic Spread Using R
By Chua Gim Hong, Huang LiWei and Ngo Siew Hui
Abstract
A pandemic is an epidemic or outbreak of infectious disease that spreads rapidly not only to many people, but across countries. The unprecedented mobility of people and food over the last 30 years has seen a steady increase in the frequency and diversity of disease outbreaks. No country is immune to this growing global threat. Scientists are predicting that it is not a matter of if, but when the next pandemic will happen. Singapore, as a small city state, with the highest population density in the world and one of the highest air passenger traffic, is particularly vulnerable.
There are reasons to remain optimistic, as Singapore’s SMART Nation initiatives and modern healthcare systems’ electronic records have open up new possibilities in the fight against potential infectious disease outbreaks in the country. Data will be increasingly ubiquitous as the world, including Singapore, continues to make significant advancement in the digitalisation age. Insights from the data have the potential to offer a critical line of preparedness needed through early identification, rapid effective response, and containment of disease outbreaks.
Using R programming to analyse a synthetic dataset (i.e. computer- and human-generated data) relating to a major disease outbreak that spanned several cities across the world in 2009, we have developed a visualisation tool and deployed it as an interactive dashboard prototype via R Shiny. This visualisation tool can potentially be used by health officials to analyse the hospitalisation data and characterise the spread of the pandemic across countries should an actual disease outbreak happen. We have demonstrated the capabilities of this visualisation tool through the use of calendar heatmap, trellis plot and other new visualisation graphing methods. The efficacy of each of these visual analytics techniques will be discussed in detail. We will also suggest possibilities for future works by combining hospital records with other data sources.
[VAST Challenge 2010 - Characterisation of Pandemic Spread]
