Left to Right:  Michael L. Pack, Darya Filippova, Tom Furlani, Michael VanDaniker  -  PHOTO Courtesy of Frank Broen, Teach America, Inc.

TITLE:

“Visual Analytics for Transportation Incident Data Sets” - TRB Paper No. 09-2034 version 2

ABSTRACT:

Transportation systems are being monitored at an unprecedented scope which is resulting in tremendously detailed traffic and incident databases.  While the transportation community emphasizes developing standards for storing this incident data, little effort has been made to design appropriate visual analytics tools to explore the data, extract meaningful knowledge, and represent results.  Analyzing these large multivariate geospatial datasets is a non-trivial task.  A novel, web-based, visual analytics tool called Fervor is proposed as an application that affords sophisticated yet user-friendly analysis of transportation incident datasets.  Interactive maps, histograms, two-dimensional plots and parallel coordinates plots are four featured visualizations that are integrated together to allow users to simultaneously interact with and see relationships between multiple visualizations.  Accompanied by a rich set of filters, users can create custom conditions to filter data and focus on a smaller dataset. However, due to the multivariate nature of the data, finding interesting relationships can be a time-consuming task.  Therefore, a rank-by-feature framework has been adopted and further expanded to quantify the strength of relationships between the different fields describing the data. In this paper, transportation incident data collected by the Maryland State Highway Administration’s CHART program is used; however, the tool can be easily modified to accept other transportation datasets.