GeoDEN: A Visual Exploration Tool for Analysing the Geographic Spread of Dengue Serotypes

TL;DR

GeoDEN addresses the need for interactive, multi-scale exploration of dengue serotype spread and interactions using a visual analytics approach co-designed with domain experts. The tool integrates a map, timeline heatmap, and co-occurrence plot with linked controls to visualize serotype reports, trajectories, and environmental basemap-based expectations across space and time. Through insight-based and value-driven evaluations with dengue experts, GeoDEN demonstrated the ability to confirm known patterns, uncover novel insights, and facilitate hypothesis generation, while highlighting data quality and resolution as key limitations. The work offers a generalizable framework for exploratory analysis of serotype data and proposes future directions including finer-grained data, molecular epidemiology integration, and LLM-driven contextualization.

Abstract

Static maps and animations remain popular in spatial epidemiology of dengue, limiting the analytical depth and scope of visualisations. Over half of the global population live in dengue endemic regions. Understanding the spatiotemporal dynamics of the four closely related dengue serotypes, and their immunological interactions, remains a challenge at a global scale. To facilitate this understanding, we worked with dengue epidemiologists in a user-centered design framework to create GeoDEN, an exploratory visualisation tool that empowers experts to investigate spatiotemporal patterns in dengue serotype reports. The tool has several linked visualisations and filtering mechanisms, enabling analysis at a range of spatial and temporal scales. To identify successes and failures, we present both insight-based and value-driven evaluations. Our domain experts found GeoDEN valuable, verifying existing hypotheses and uncovering novel insights that warrant further investigation by the epidemiology community. The developed visual exploration approach can be adapted for exploring other epidemiology and disease incident datasets.

Figures (8)

• Figure 1: Report glyphs with different sets of active serotypes.
• Figure 2: A centroid glyph, depicted as a greywhite diamond, showing the centroid of reports in Venezuela.
• Figure 3: A trajectory line showing the movement of serotype centroids across Venezuela and Columbia.
• Figure 4: The environmental suitability base mapbasemap.
• Figure 5: Colour scale used to encode environmental suitability.