Big Data Analytics and Visualization for Food Health Status Determination Using Bigmart Data

Being premature, the traditional data visualization techniques suffer from several challenges and lack the ability to handle a huge amount of data, particularly in gigabytes and terabytes. In this research, we propose an R-tool and data analytics framework for handling a huge amount of commercial market stored data and discover knowledge patterns from the dataset for conveying the derived conclusion. In this chapter, we elaborate on pre-processing a commercial market dataset using the R tool and its packages for information and visual analytics. We suggest a recommendation system based on the data which identifies if the food entry inserted into the database is hygienic or non-hygienic based on the quality preserved attributes. For a precise recommendation system with strong predictive accuracy, we will put emphasis on Algorithms such as J48 or Naive Bayes and utilize the one who outclasses the comparison based on accuracy. Such a system, when combined with R language, can be potentially used for enhanced decision making.

Exploring the Association between Demographics and Cancer

Objective: We explore the association between demographics and the most prevalent cancers in the United States by analyzing empirical data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with indicators like cancer site, cancer incidence rate, relative survival rate, death rate, and demographic and lifestyle factors. Identifying cancer-related factors can contribute to improvements in treatment and management of the disease. Method: We use visual analytics to show behavioral factors and age to be associated with increasing incidence rates. Principal Results: Females are more susceptible to breast and males to prostate cancer. As a preventive measure, national healthcare entities, insurance companies and the government should consider both gender and age factors and monitor behavioral health measures like drugs and diet, in evaluating cancer treatment/mitigation. Main conclusions: Preventive care combined with improved outcomes and reduced costs is necessary. We offer implications for all developed countries in identifying key areas to target and manage public health.

Developing Conversational Agents for Use in Criminal Investigations

The adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) systems in environments that involve high risk and high consequence decision-making is severely hampered by critical design issues. These issues include system transparency and brittleness, where transparency relates to (i) the explainability of results and (ii) the ability of a user to inspect and verify system goals and constraints; and brittleness, (iii) the ability of a system to adapt to new user demands. Transparency is a particular concern for criminal intelligence analysis, where there are significant ethical and trust issues that arise when algorithmic and system processes are not adequately understood by a user. This prevents adoption of potentially useful technologies in policing environments. In this article, we present a novel approach to designing a conversational agent (CA) AI system for intelligence analysis that tackles these issues. We discuss the results and implications of three different studies; a Cognitive Task Analysis to understand analyst thinking when retrieving information in an investigation, Emergent Themes Analysis to understand the explanation needs of different system components, and an interactive experiment with a prototype conversational agent. Our prototype conversational agent, named Pan, demonstrates transparency provision and mitigates brittleness by evolving new CA intentions. We encode interactions with the CA with human factors principles for situation recognition and use interactive visual analytics to support analyst reasoning. Our approach enables complex AI systems, such as Pan, to be used in sensitive environments, and our research has broader application than the use case discussed.

VADAF: Visualization for Abnormal Client Detection and Analysis in Federated Learning

Federated Learning (FL) provides a powerful solution to distributed machine learning on a large corpus of decentralized data. It ensures privacy and security by performing computation on devices (which we refer to as clients) based on local data to improve the shared global model. However, the inaccessibility of the data and the invisibility of the computation make it challenging to interpret and analyze the training process, especially to distinguish potential client anomalies. Identifying these anomalies can help experts diagnose and improve FL models. For this reason, we propose a visual analytics system, VADAF, to depict the training dynamics and facilitate analyzing potential client anomalies. Specifically, we design a visualization scheme that supports massive training dynamics in the FL environment. Moreover, we introduce an anomaly detection method to detect potential client anomalies, which are further analyzed based on both the client model’s visual and objective estimation. Three case studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of our system in understanding the FL training process and supporting abnormal client detection and analysis.

BONNIE: Building Online Narratives from Noteworthy Interaction Events

Nowadays, we have access to data of unprecedented volume, high dimensionality, and complexity. To extract novel insights from such complex and dynamic data, we need effective and efficient strategies. One such strategy is to combine data analysis and visualization techniques, which are the essence of visual analytics applications. After the knowledge discovery process, a major challenge is to filter the essential information that has led to a discovery and to communicate the findings to other people, explaining the decisions they may have made based on the data. We propose to record and use the trace left by the exploratory data analysis, in the form of user interaction history, to aid this process. With the trace, users can choose the desired interaction steps and create a narrative, sharing the acquired knowledge with readers. To achieve our goal, we have developed the BONNIE ( Building Online Narratives from Noteworthy Interaction Events ) framework. BONNIE comprises a log model to register the interaction events, auxiliary code to help developers instrument their own code, and an environment to view users’ own interaction history and build narratives. This article presents our proposal for communicating discoveries in visual analytics applications, the BONNIE framework, and the studies we conducted to evaluate our solution. After two user studies (the first one focused on history visualization and the second one focused on narrative creation), our solution has showed to be promising, with mostly positive feedback and results from a Technology Acceptance Model ( TAM ) questionnaire.