SOCR MotionCharts HousingPriceIndex
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SOCR MotionCharts Activities - Housing Price Index Activity
Summary
This activity demonstrates the usage and functionality of SOCR MotionCharts using the SOCR Housing Price Index dataset.
Goals
The aims of this activity is to:
- demonstrate data import, MotionChart manipulations and results interpretation
- explore the interactive graphical visualization of of a real-life multidimensional dataset
- TBD
Background
The amount, complexity and provenance of data has dramatically increased in the last few years. Visualization of observed and simulated data is a critical component of any social, environmental, biomedical or scientific quest. Dynamic, exploratory and interactive visualization of multivariate data, without preprocessing by dimensionality reduction, remains an insurmountable challenge. SOCR MotionCharts provide a new paradigm for discovery-based exploratory analysis of multivariate data. This interactive data visualization tool enables the visualization of high-dimensional longitudinal data. SOCR Motion Charts allows mapping of ordinal, nominal and quantitative variables onto time, axes, size, colors, glyphs and appearance characteristics, which facilitates the interactive display of multidimensional data. SOCR Motion Charts can be used as instructional tool for rendering and interrogating high-dimensional data in the classroom, as well as a research tool for exploratory data analysis.
Description
In addition to this activity, open 2 more browser tabs - one pointing to the SOCR MotionCharts applet and the other displaying the SOCR Housing Price Index dataset. The image below shows this setting.
Activity
The house price index data was provided by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight. The data represents the average housing price for all states between the years 2000 and 2006. The data also includes the average unemployment rate, population (in thousands), the percent subprime loans, and the region by state.
- Using the mouse, copy the data from the SOCR data web page, click on the first cell (top-left) in the DATA tab of the SOCR Motion Charts applet, and paste the data in the spreadsheet.
- Next, you need to map the column-variables to different properties it the SOCR MotionChart. For example, you can us the following mapping:
| Variables | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SOCR MotionChart Property | Key | X-Axis | Y-Axis | Size | Color | Category |
| Data Column Name | Year | HPI | UR | Pop | Region | State |
The figures below represent snapshots of the generated dynamic SOCR motion chart. In the real applet, you can play (animate) or scroll (1-year steps) through the years (2000, ..., 2006). You can also change what variables are mapped to the following SOCR MotionCharts properties:
- Key, X-Axis, Y-Axis, Size, Color and Category.
Data type and format
SOCR Motion Charts currently accepts three types of data: numbers, dates/time, and strings. With these data types, we feel that the application is able to handle the majority of data out here. We use the natural ordering of these types as defined by Java however. While many types of data can be interpreted as a string, it may not make sense to use lexicological ordering on all the different types. When designing SOCR Motion Charts, we took this into consideration and designed the application so that it can easily be extended to provide a greater variety of interpreted types. Thus, a developer should be able to easily provide better type interpretation for particular types of data.
Applications
The SOCR MotionCharts can be used in a variety of applications to visualize dynamic relationships in multidimensional data in up to four dimensions and a fifth temporal component. Its design and implementation allow for extensions allowing and supporting higher dimensions plug-ins. The overall purpose of SOCR MotionCharts is to provide users with a way to visualize the relationships between multiple variables over a period of time in a simple, intuitive and animated fashion.
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