Kernel Density Visualization for Big Geospatial Data: Algorithms and Applications

Tsz Nam Chan, Leong Hou U, Byron Choi, Jianliang Xu, Reynold Cheng

Abstract: The use of Kernel Density Visualization (KDV) has become widespread in a number of disciplines, including geography, crime science, transportation science, and ecology, for analyzing geospatial data. However, the growing scale of massive geospatial data has rendered many commonly used software tools unable of generating high-resolution KDVs, leading to concerns about the inefficiency of KDV. This 90-minute tutorial aims to raise awareness among database researchers about this important, emerging, database-related, and interdisciplinary topic. It is structured into four parts: a thorough discussion of the background of KDV, a review of state-of-the-art methods for generating KDVs, a discussion of key variants of KDV, including network kernel density visualization (NKDV) and spatiotemporal kernel density visualization (STKDV), and an outline of future directions for this topic.