Human Factors in Streaming Data Analysis: Challenges and Opportunities for Information Visualization

Abstract

Real‐world systems change continuously. In domains such as traffic monitoring or cyber security, such changes occur within short time scales. This results in a streaming data problem and leads to unique challenges for the human in the loop, as analysts have to ingest and make sense of dynamic patterns in real time. While visualizations are being increasingly used by analysts to derive insights from streaming data, we lack a thorough characterization of the human‐centred design problems and a critical analysis of the state‐of‐the‐art solutions that exist for addressing these problems. In this paper, our goal is to fill this gap by studying how the state of the art in streaming data visualization handles the challenges and reflect on the gaps and opportunities. To this end, we have three contributions in this paper: (i) problem characterization for identifying domain‐specific goals and challenges for handling streaming data, (ii) a survey and analysis of the state of the art in streaming data visualization research with a focus on how visualization design meets challenges specific to change perception and (iii) reflections on the design trade‐offs, and an outline of potential research directions for addressing the gaps in the state of the art.Real‐world systems change continuously. In domains such as traffic monitoring or cyber security, such changes occur within short time scales. This results in a streaming data problem and leads to unique challenges for the human in the loop, as analysts have to ingest and make sense of dynamic patterns in real time. While visualizations are being increasingly used by analysts to derive insights from streaming data, we lack a thorough characterization of the human‐centred design problems and a critical analysis of the state‐of‐the‐art solutions that exist for addressing these problems.