Visual Analytics approach for finding spatiotemporal patterns from COVID19

TL;DR

This paper explores how spatiotemporal modeling and visual analytics can identify geographic and temporal patterns in COVID-19 related economic data to improve loan support schemes and assess business vulnerability.

Contribution

It introduces a novel framework combining clustering and visual analytics to analyze geospatial and temporal patterns in business data during COVID-19.

Findings

Inner and Outer London show distinct spatial patterns.

COVID-19 reversed historic business failure patterns.

Sector influence affects spatial clustering.

Abstract

Bounce Back Loan is amongst a number of UK business financial support schemes launched by UK Government in 2020 amidst pandemic lockdown. Through these schemes, struggling businesses are provided financial support to weather economic slowdown from pandemic lockdown. {\pounds}43.5bn loan value has been provided as of 17th Dec2020. However, with no major checks for granting these loans and looming prospect of loan losses from write-offs from failed businesses and fraud, this paper theorizes prospect of applying spatiotemporal modelling technique to explore if geospatial patterns and temporal analysis could aid design of loan grant criteria for schemes. Application of Clustering and Visual Analytics framework to business demographics, survival rate and Sector concentration shows Inner and Outer London spatial patterns which historic business failures and reversal of the patterns under COVID-19 implying sector influence on spatial clusters. Combination of unsupervised clustering technique with multinomial logistic regression modelling on research datasets complimented by additional datasets on other support schemes, business structure and financial crime, is recommended for modelling business vulnerability to certain types of financial market or economic condition. The limitations of clustering technique for high dimensional is discussed along with relevance of an applicable model for continuing the research through next steps.