ORDENA: ORigin-DEstiNAtion data exploration

TL;DR

ORDENA is a visual analytic tool that enables exploration of origin-destination flow data through an intuitive scatter plot, helping users uncover spatial patterns and understand flow attributes despite large datasets.

Contribution

The paper introduces ORDENA, a novel visualization tool that simplifies the exploration of origin-destination data and enhances interpretability with explainability features.

Findings

Effective in revealing spatial phenomena in data

Received positive feedback from domain experts

Facilitates understanding of flow attributes

Abstract

Analyzing origin-destination flows is an important problem that has been extensively investigated in several scientific fields, particularly by the visualization community. The problem becomes especially challenging when involving massive data, demanding mechanisms such as data aggregation and interactive filtering to make the exploratory process doable. However, data aggregation tends to smooth out certain patterns, and deciding which data should be filtered is not straightforward. In this work, we propose ORDENA, a visual analytic tool to explore origin and destination data. ORDENA is built upon a simple and intuitive scatter plot where the horizontal and vertical axes correspond to origins and destinations. Therefore, each origin-destination flow is represented as a point in the scatter plot. How the points are organized in the plot layout reveals important spatial phenomena present in the data. Moreover, ORDENA provides explainability resources that allow users to better understand the relation between origin-destination flows and associated attributes. We illustrate ORDENA's effectiveness in a set of case studies, which have also been elaborated in collaboration with domain experts. The proposed tool has also been evaluated by domain experts not involved in its development, which provided quite positive feedback about ORDENA.