An Intelligent Visual Big Data Analytics Framework for Supporting Interactive Exploration and Visualization of Big OLAP Cubes

Abstract

Visual big data analytics aims at supporting big data analytics via visual metaphors, with a plethora of applications in modern settings and scenarios. In all these domains, visual big data analytics paradigms offer several advantages, among which some noticeable ones are: (i) fast knowledge understanding from big data sets; (ii) pattern and trend discovery from big data sets; (iii) entity and model discovery from big data sets; (iv) sharing insights among organizations. Among several proposals, OLAP-based visual big data analytics methodologies and tools represents a successful case of visual big data analytics frameworks, which is entirely based on OLAP analysis. In this context, an OLAP cube is typically explored with multiple aggregations selecting different subsets of cube dimensions to analyze trends or to discover unexpected results. Unfortunately, such analytic process is generally manual and fails to statistically explain results. On the basis of these considerations, in this paper we propose an innovative OLAP-shaped visual big data analytics framework that incorporates a state-of-the-art statistical technique for supporting exploration and visualization of OLAP data cubes. An experimental evaluation with a medical data set presents statistically significant results and interactive visualizations, which link risk factors and degree of disease.