Graphical overlays that layer visual elements onto charts, are effective to convey insights and context in financial narrative visualizations. However, automating graphical overlays is challenging due to complex narrative structures and limited understanding of effective overlays. To address the challenge, we first summarize the commonly used graphical overlays and narrative structures, and the proper correspondence between them in financial narrative visualizations, elected by a survey of 1752 layered charts with corresponding narratives. We then design FinFlier, a two-stage innovative system leveraging a knowledge-grounding large language model to automate graphical overlays for financial visualizations. The text-data binding module enhances the connection between financial vocabulary and tabular data through advanced prompt engineering, and the graphics overlaying module generates effective overlays with narrative sequencing. We demonstrate the feasibility and expressiveness of FinFlier through a gallery of graphical overlays covering diverse financial narrative visualizations. Performance evaluations and user studies further confirm system's effectiveness and the quality of generated layered charts.

Insight mining transforms complex data into actionable knowledge, enabling effective decision-making across diverse domains. Given the richness and interpretative power of visualizations, visual insight mining - the process of extracting meaningful insights from raw data through intuitive visual representations - has become increasingly vital. This survey systematically reviews the current landscape of visual insight mining, addressing the critical questions: “How can visualizations be generated from data?” and “How can insights be extracted from visualizations?” . Specifically, we delve into six distinct tasks (i.e., task decomposition, visualization generation, visualization recommendation, chart parsing, chart question answering, and insight generation) in the process of visual insight mining, and provide a comprehensive analysis of rule-based, learning-based, and large-model-based methods for each task. Based on the survey, we discuss current research challenges and outline future opportunities. By viewing visualization as a bridge in the data-to-insight path, this survey offers a structured foundation for further exploration in visual insight mining.

Higher-order patterns reveal sequential multistep state transitions, which are usually superior to origin-destination analyses that depict only first-order geospatial movement patterns. Conventional methods for higher-order movement modeling first construct a directed acyclic graph (DAG) of movements and then extract higher-order patterns from the DAG. However, DAG-based methods rely heavily on identifying movement keypoints, which are challenging for sparse movements and fail to consider the temporal variants critical for movements in urban environments. To overcome these limitations, we propose HoLens, a novel approach for modeling and visualizing higher-order movement patterns in the context of an urban environment. HoLens mainly makes twofold contributions: First, we designed an auto-adaptive movement aggregation algorithm that self-organizes movements hierarchically by considering spatial proximity, contextual information, and temporal variability. Second, we developed an interactive visual analytics interface comprising well-established visualization techniques, including the H-Flow for visualizing the higher-order patterns on the map and the higher-order state sequence chart for representing the higher-order state transitions. Two real-world case studies demonstrate that the method can adaptively aggregate data and exhibit the process of exploring higher-order patterns using HoLens. We also demonstrate the feasibility, usability, and effectiveness of our approach through expert interviews with three domain experts.

Deep learning (DL) approaches are being increasingly used for time-series forecasting, with many efforts devoted to designing complex DL models. Recent studies have shown that the DL success is often attributed to effective data representations, fostering the fields of feature engineering and representation learning. However, automated approaches for feature learning are typically limited with respect to incorporating prior knowledge, identifying interactions among variables, and choosing evaluation metrics to ensure that the models are reliable. To improve on these limitations, this paper contributes a novel visual analytics framework, namely TimeTuner, designed to help analysts understand how model behaviors are associated with localized correlations, stationarity, and granularity of time-series representations. The system mainly consists of the following two-stage technique: We first leverage counterfactual explanations to connect the relationships among time-series representations, multivariate features and model predictions. Next, we design multiple coordinated views including a partition-based correlation matrix and juxtaposed bivariate stripes, and provide a set of interactions that allow users to step into the transformation selection process, navigate through the feature space, and reason the model performance. We instantiate TimeTuner with two transformation methods of smoothing and sampling, and demonstrate its applicability on real-world time-series forecasting of univariate sunspots and multivariate air pollutants. Feedback from domain experts indicates that our system can help characterize time-series representations and guide the feature engineering processes.

Generative AI (GenAI) has witnessed remarkable progress in recent years and demonstrated impressive performance in various generation tasks in different domains such as computer vision and computational design. Many researchers have attempted to integrate GenAI into visualization framework, leveraging the superior generative capacity for different operations. Concurrently, recent major breakthroughs in GenAI like diffusion model and large language model have also drastically increase the potential of GenAI4VIS. From a technical perspective, this paper looks back on previous visualization studies leveraging GenAI and discusses the challenges and opportunities for future research. Specifically, we cover the applications of different types of GenAI methods including sequence, tabular, spatial and graph generation techniques for different tasks of visualization which we summarize into four major stages: data enhancement, visual mapping generation, stylization and interaction. For each specific visualization sub-task, we illustrate the typical data and concrete GenAI algorithms, aiming to provide in-depth understanding of the state-of-the-art GenAI4VIS techniques and their limitations. Furthermore, based on the survey, we discuss three major aspects of challenges and research opportunities including evaluation, dataset, and the gap between end-to-end GenAI methods and visualizations. By summarizing different generation algorithms, their current applications and limitations, this paper endeavors to provide useful insights for future GenAI4VIS research.

The COVID-19 pandemic requires multidisciplinary efforts to address its profound social and economic repercussions. Combining social hierarchical perspectives and a Multiple Coordinated View (MCV) visualization system, this paper depicts how social and physical residential environment shapes individuals’ infection risk during such pandemic. Through analyzing the travel records of 8000+ confirmed cases in spatial and temporal channels, we identify that there exists segregation of virus transmission among different social classes and individuals from deprived neighborhoods exhibit a higher risk of the virus infection. Leveraging our proposed interactive visualization system, policymakers and stakeholders can make more informed decisions to effectively manage and contain the spread of infectious pandemics like COVID-19.

Many video websites offer packages composed of paid videos. Users who purchase a package become members of the website, and thus can enjoy the membership service, such as watching the paid videos. It is practically important to predict which users will become members so that the website can recommend them the suitable packages for purchasing. Existing works generally predict the purchase behavior of users through capturing their interests in items. However, such works cannot be directly applied to the studied problem due to the following challenges. First, some important features of videos and packages change over time, such as the number of clicks and the update of the videos. Existing methods are not capable to capture such dynamic features. Second, a user's purchasing intention is very hard to capture. A user watching a video does not necessarily mean that he/she would like to purchase the corresponding package. In this paper, we propose a Dynamic Evolution based Deep Hierarchical Intention Network (Dy-HIEN for short) for membership prediction, which contains two modules. In the first module, we design a dynamic embedding learning method, applying multi-relational heterogeneous information network and attention mechanism to effectively represent the embedding of videos and packages. In the second module, a hierarchical method is proposed to extract the purchase intention of users. First, the video play history is divided into sessions based on the clicks on packages, and then time-order encoder and kernel functions are applied to mine the intention pattern associated with the package clicked in each session. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets are conducted to demonstrate the advantages of the proposed model on a variety of evaluation metrics.