Interactive Generation of Visual Summaries for Multivariate Geographical Data Analysis

The visual analysis of geographically referenced datasets with a large number of attributes is challenging due to the fact that the characteristics of the attributes are highly dependent upon the locations at which they are focussed and the scale at which they are measured. Here, we develop attribute signatures – interactively crafted graphics that show the geographic variability of statistics of attributes through which the extent of dependency between the attributes and geography can be visually explored. We compute a number of statistical measures and use them as a basis for our visualizations. Our methods allow variation in multiple statistical summaries of multiple attributes to be considered concurrently and geographically, as evidenced by an example in which the census geography of two cities in UK are explored.