Visualizing Spatiotemporal Epidemic Clusters on a Map-based Dashboard: A case study of early COVID-19 cases in Singapore

Abstract. Spatiotemporal distribution of the epidemic data plays an important role in its understanding and prediction. In order to understand the transmission patterns of infectious diseases in a more intuitive way, many works applied various visualizations to show the epidemic datasets. However, most of them focus on visualizing the epidemic information at the overall level such as the confirmed counts each country, while spending less effort on powering user to effectively understand and reason the very large and complex epidemic datasets through flexible interactions. In this paper, the authors proposed a novel map-based dashboard for visualizing and analyzing spatiotemporal clustering patterns and transmission chains of epidemic data. We used 102 confirmed cases officially reported by the Ministry of Health in Singapore as the test dataset. This experiment shown that the well-designed and interactive map-based dashboard is effective in shorten the time that users required to mine the spatiotemporal characteristics and transmission chains behind the textual and numerical epidemic data.