Group01 Report

WORLD DEVELOPMENT INDICATORS: A NEW VISUAL PERSPECTIVE
A web-based analytics application to visualize countries development across the globe

OVERVIEW

PROPOSAL

POSTER

APPLICATION

REPORT

Visual Design Framework

Raw Data

Data Tables

Visual Structure

Circlize in R

For development of the visual application, R will be used as the base code with the focus on using Circlize package to create the graphical visualization for WDI data.

The reason for selecting the Circlize package is that Circular layout is an efficient way for the visualization of massive amounts of information. This package provides an implementation of circular layout generation in R and provide the flexibility the use low-level and high-level graphics functions as defined by users for specific purposes. Together with the seamless connection between the powerful computational and visual environment in R, it gives users more convenience and freedom to design figures for better understanding complex patterns behind multiple dimensional data.

Circular visualization is popular in Genomics related fields. It is efficient in revealing associations in high dimensional genomic data. Other used case includes visualizing for the movement of Global migration where movement can be plotted using Chord diagram within a circular plot.

This project will be the very first known project to use circular plot represent the multi-dimensional WDI data to create a whole new graphical visualization to the user.

Data structure and display

• A circular layout is composed of sectors, tracks and cells.
• As illustrated in the figure below, the red circle is one track, the blue represents one sector and the intersection of a sector and a track is called a cell.
• Within each cell circlize allows the data to be displayed in the form of line graph, bar chart, histogram, scatterplot and heatmap.
• For the inner-most track, Circlize also allows chord diagram to visualize movement and relationship within data as well as a clustering to be performed.

Visual Representation

WDI data will be mapped into 3 circular plot in for 3 different type of visual representation as illustrated below:

Circular Plot (SeriesTrend)

Circular Plot (Country Trend)

Circular Plot (Series Comparison)

Observation and Insights

Use case using Health Topic

Limitation and Future Works

Limitation of the current application

• Circular plot render for the application can only be able to analyse trend. No absolute value comparison.
• Restricted to 360 degree view. i.e unable to display too many data else each cell width will be very small and hard to visualize.
• Range for the selected time-series data must not have any "blank" values, else the who series will be excluded from the circular plot.
• Shiny file upload limitation of 30MB per file.
• Application can only support .csv file
• No. of Sector values selection will determine the No. of Cluster available. i.e No. of Cluster cannot be less than the No. of Sector values selected.

Future improvement of the application

• Allow to be filtered by Region for regional comparison
• Update of series indicators to read new indicators that might be introduce in future WDI data.

References

• Circular Visualization in R, Zuguang Gu
• The R Graph Gallery – Circular Plot
• Circos Development for Genome Research
• A Visual Exploratorium of Refugee Flows Over the World
• The Global Flow of People