ISSS608 2016-17 T3 Assign SANGHAVY BALAMOUROUGANE
Assignment - Mini Challenge1 of Lekagul Reserve Challenge
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Contents
Challenge Background
Mistford is a mid-size city is located to the southwest of a large nature preserve. The city has a small industrial area with four light-manufacturing endeavors. Mitch Vogel is a post-doc student studying ornithology at Mistford College and has been discovering signs that the number of nesting pairs of the Rose-Crested Blue Pipit, a popular local bird due to its attractive plumage and pleasant songs, is decreasing! The decrease is sufficiently significant that the Pangera Ornithology Conservation Society is sponsoring Mitch to undertake additional studies to identify the possible reasons. Mitch is gaining access to several datasets that may help him in his work, and he has asked you (and your colleagues) as experts in visual analytics to help him analyze these datasets.
Mini-Challenge 1 - Overview
The Boonsong Lekagul Nature Preserve is used by local residents and tourists for day-trips, overnight camping or sometimes just passing through to access main thoroughfares on the opposite sides of the preserve. The entrance booths of the preserve are monitored in order to generate revenue as well as monitor usage. Vehicles entering and exiting the preserve must pay a fee based on their number of axles (personal auto, recreational trailer, semi-trailer, etc.). This generates a data stream with entry/exit timestamps and vehicle type. There are also other locations in the part that register traffic passing through. While hiking through the various parts of the preserve, Mitch has noticed some odd behaviors of vehicles that he doesn’t think are consistent with the kinds of park visitors he would expect. If there were some way that Mitch could analyze the behaviors of vehicles through the park over time, this may assist him in his investigations.
As part of his investigation, ornithology student Mitch Vogel needs to examine the movement of traffic through the Boonsong Lekagul Nature Preserve. His first working hypothesis is that there is some link between the traffic going through the preserve and the decline in the nesting Rose-crested Blue Pipit—maybe the traffic noises are drowning out mating calls! Or perhaps he can discover some odd goings on in the traffic patterns—perhaps campers are invading the bird’s habitat areas?
There are park rangers working as caretakers of the nature preserve, and they have been collecting traffic data for their annual reporting to the local government. They have provided Mitch with some data, explanations about the data, and a map. Mitch feels unprepared to analyze this information alone and is asking you to help with your visual analytics prowess.
Use visual analytics to analyze the available data and develop responses to the questions below. In addition, prepare a video that shows how you used visual analytics to solve this challenge. Novel visualizations and analysis approaches are especially interesting for this mini-challenge. Please do not use any other data in your work (including other Internet-based sources or other mini-challenge data).
Please visit VAST Challenge 2017: Mini-Challenge 1 for more information and to download the data.
Questions to be answered
1. “Patterns of Life” analyses depend on recognizing repeating patterns of activities by individuals or groups. Describe up to six daily patterns of life by vehicles traveling through and within the park. Characterize the patterns by describing the kinds of vehicles participating, their spatial activities (where do they go?), their temporal activities (when does the pattern happen?), and provide a hypothesis of what the pattern represents (for example, if I drove to a coffee house every morning, but did not stay for long, you might hypothesize I’m getting coffee “to-go”). Please limit your answer to six images and 500 words.
2. Patterns of Life analyses may also depend on understanding what patterns appear over longer periods of time (in this case, over multiple days). Describe up to six patterns of life that occur over multiple days (including across the entire data set) by vehicles traveling through and within the park. Characterize the patterns by describing the kinds of vehicles participating, their spatial activities (where do they go?), their temporal activities (when does the pattern happen?), and provide a hypothesis of what the pattern represents (for example, many vehicles showing up at the same location each Saturday at the same time may suggest some activity occurring there each Saturday). Please limit your answer to six images and 500 words.
3. Unusual patterns may be patterns of activity that changes from an established pattern, or are just difficult to explain from what you know of a situation. Describe up to six unusual patterns (either single day or multiple days) and highlight why you find them unusual. Please limit your answer to six images and 500 words.
4. What are the top 3 patterns you discovered that you suspect could be most impactful to bird life in the nature preserve? (Provide a short text answer.)
Visualisation Software
- Tableau
Reference
Feedback (from Discussion Tab)
by Chua Gim Hong
Overall, very interesting analysis and easy to understand visuals. For the first two graphs, please explore if you can improve on the clarity by (1) aligning the title with the description/labels on both axes (2) sorting the colour legends in the same order as the graphs and (3) using percentile on vertical axes to avoid cluttering of low values near the horizontal axes. For the next five graphs, please explore increasing the size of the images and the above suggestions. When using the map, please explore a larger image so that the fonts on the maps are large enough.
by Akanksha Mittal
Hi Sanghavy, you have put nice efforts in your work. But there are few points that I would like to highlight which we learnt in class as well as through reader’s perspective. Reader’s perspective: 1. The last point in “Vehicle Activities” section is not supported by any visual. It will be better if you can provide one. Aesthetics: 1. For all the line graphs especially in “Vehicle Activities” section, inking can be done to darken the axis values a bit. It is too light. 2. In the maps used for showing unusual patterns for 4 axle trucks, you can reduce the width of the line to show connectivity. Clarity: 1. In “Vehicle Activities” section, labels are missing in the graph.
by Sandeep Challa
You presented a very nice analysis, which is answering the questions of the challenge. Please find my comments apart from what Akanhsha has mentioned. In daily patterns you should also look at the activity of vehicles during the night which is very important deducing the answer. There is vehicle activity during the night, no patrolling activity and this might be one of the reasons for the decline in bird population. I notice that in the gate types based on the activity you have used two separate graphs, instead 1 graph could have been provided. Maybe, you would want to also explore dual axis feature in Tableau. This would lend more readability to the plots. You have only shown one pattern for question 2. You could have derived more patterns over a long period of time. Take you classmates' answers as reference and try to derive more patterns which will help you in answering the questions . Hope my comments will help you improve your answer
