ISSS608 2017-18 T1 Assign DENG YUETONG

Vastopolis Epidemic Outbreak Research

Background

Data Preparation

Visualization

Background

Smartpolis is a major metropolitan area with a population of approximately two million residents. During the last few days, health professionals at local hospitals have noticed a dramatic increase in reported illnesses. Observed symptoms are largely flu-­like and include fever, chills,sweats, aches and pains, fatigue, coughing, breathing difficulty, nausea and vomiting, diarrhea, and enlarged lymph nodes. More recently, there have been several deaths believed to be associated with the current outbreak. City officials fear a possible epidemic and are mobilizing emergency management resources to mitigate the impact. You have been charged with providing an assessment of the situation. As a senior visual data analyst, I'm trying my best to locate the answers to the following questions: 1. The outbreak origin; 2. Hypothesis for disease transmission; 3. Status of outbreak containment.

Outbreak Origin

Based on the data extracted from the original dataset (by keywords: flu, fever, cough, cold, chills, pain, etc.), the real-time GPS locations of people who published microblogs contained flu-relevant keywords are plotted for our better understanding of the overall distribution of sick people. To find out the areas that have been most significantly affected, I have plotted a polygon chart to represent the density of people that have complained about the disease. From the chart below we are able to find out that the Downtown and Uptown area have been the area that suffer most from the disease based on the depth of color.

It's quite reasonable, since the daytime and nighttime population data has already suggested that Downtown and Uptown area have the largest population of the entire area.

Hypothesis for disease transmission

Software

• Tableau
• JMP
• Microsoft Excel