SWS: A Complexity-Optimized Solution for Spatial-Temporal Kernel Density Visualization

Spatial-temporal kernel density visualization (STKDV) has been extensively used in a wide range of applications, e.g., disease outbreak analysis, traffic accident hotspot detection, and crime hotspot detection. While STKDV can provide accurate and comprehensive data visualization, computing STKDV is time-consuming, which is not scalable to large-scale datasets. To address this issue, we develop a new sliding-window-based solution (SWS), which theoretically reduces the time complexity for generating STKDV, without increasing the space complexity. Moreover, we incorporate SWS with the progressive visualization framework, which can continuously output partial visualization results to users (from coarse to fine), until users satisfy the visualization. Our experimental studies on five large-scale datasets show that SWS achieves 1.71x to 24x speedup compared with the state-of-the-art methods.