An Extensible Dashboard Architecture For Visualizing Base And Analyzed Data

Abstract

Any data analysis, especially the data sets that may be changing often or in real-time, consists of at least three important synchronized components: i) figuring out what to infer (objectives), ii) analysis or computation of objectives, and iii) understanding of the results which may require drill-down and/or visualization. There is a lot of attention paid to the first two of the above components as part of research whereas the understanding as well as deriving actionable decisions is quite tricky. Visualization is an important step towards both understanding (even by non-experts) and inferring the actions that need to be taken. As an example, for Covid-19, knowing regions (say, at the county or state level) that have seen a spike or prone to a spike in cases in the near future may warrant additional actions with respect to gatherings, business opening hours, etc. This paper focuses on an extensible architecture for visualization of base as well as analyzed data. This paper proposes a modular architecture of a dashboard for user-interaction, visualization management, and complex analysis of base data. The contributions of this paper are: i) extensibility of the architecture providing flexibility to add additional analysis, visualizations, and user interactions without changing the workflow, ii) decoupling of the functional modules to ease and speedup development by different groups, and iii) address efficiency issues for display response time. This paper uses Multilayer Networks (or MLNs) for analysis. To showcase the above, we present the implementation of a visualization dashboard, termed CoWiz++ (for Covid Wizard), and elaborate on how web-based user interaction and display components are interfaced seamlessly with the back end modules.