Visual Interactive Parameter Selection for Temporal Blind Source Separation

Abstract

Many fields of science and industry collect and analyze multivariate time-varying measurements, e.g., healthcare, geophysics, or finance. Such data is oftenhigh-dimensional, correlated, and noisy. Experts are interested in latent compo-nents of the dataset, but due to the properties above, these are difficult to ob-tain. Temporal Blind Source Separation (TBSS) is a suitable and well-establishedframework for these data. However, the wide choice of methods and their tuningparameters impede the effective use of TBSS in practice. Visual Analytics (VA)aims to create powerful analytic tools by combining the strengths of humans andcomputers. We designed, developed, and evaluated VA contributions in previouswork to support TBSS-related analysis tasks. This paper highlights the benefitsand opportunities of VA concepts for statistics-oriented problems. We demon-strate how their analysis workflow can be supported using an important TBSSapplication example with a real-world dataset of meteorological measurements in Italy.