Visual analytics of a pandemic spread: VAST 2010 Mini Challenge 2 award: Thorough description of analytic process

In this paper, automated medical data analysis and visualisation are discussed. The task of the VAST 2010 Mini Challenge 2 was to characterize the spread of an epidemic outbreak. The analysis should take into consideration symptoms, mortality rates and temporal patterns of the disease. Finally, the outbreak should be compared across different locations searching for anomalies. For the preprocessing and the automated analysis of the data we used the Konstanz Information Miner (KINME), which is a modular data exploration platform that enables the user to visually create dataflows, the R software for statistical computing and some selfwritten Java programs for data preprocessing. For conducting the visual investigations we applied Many Eyes and Protovis, which compose scalable and customized views for datasets of interest.