VALS: Supporting Visual Data Analysis in Longitudinal Clinical Studies

Visual data analysis helps to understand different types of phenomena by allowing experts to explore for relationships, patterns, outliers, unexpected changes, and more. Experts need tools that help them find useful and actionable information in the data so that they can test their hypotheses and develop new ones. This need becomes more evident in longitudinal studies, where there are usually a large number of variables and the process being analyzed can be complex as well. We present VALS (Visual Analytics in Longitudinal Studies), a framework for visually exploring longitudinal clinical data. VALS includes a data model, a task categorization model, and an approach to guidance through feature engineering techniques and interactive visualizations, all of which help analysts perform their analysis tasks. VALS was designed in collaboration with healthcare experts with experience in longitudinal studies. We have also developed a tool prototype for a case study using real-world datasets. The evidence collected in the case study shows the usefulness of a VALS-based visual analytics tool.