The collection of large, complex datasets has become common across a wide
variety of domains. Visual analytics tools increasingly play a key role in
exploring and answering complex questions about these large datasets. However,
many visualizations are not designed to concurrently visualize the large number
of dimensions present in complex datasets (e.g. tens of thousands of distinct
codes in an electronic health record system). This fact, combined with the
ability of many visual analytics systems to enable rapid, ad-hoc specification
of groups, or cohorts, of individuals based on a small subset of visualized
dimensions, leads to the possibility of introducing selection bias--when the
user creates a cohort based on a specified set of dimensions, differences
across many other unseen dimensions may also be introduced. These unintended
side effects may result in the cohort no longer being representative of the
larger population intended to be studied, which can negatively affect the
validity of subsequent analyses. We present techniques for selection bias
tracking and visualization that can be incorporated into high-dimensional
exploratory visual analytics systems, with a focus on medical data with
existing data hierarchies. These techniques include: (1) tree-based cohort
provenance and visualization, with a user-specified baseline cohort that all
other cohorts are compared against, and visual encoding of the drift for each
cohort, which indicates where selection bias may have occurred, and (2) a set
of visualizations, including a novel icicle-plot based visualization, to
compare in detail the per-dimension differences between the baseline and a
user-specified focus cohort. These techniques are integrated into a medical
temporal event sequence visual analytics tool. We present example use cases and
report findings from domain expert user interviews.Comment: IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG),
Volume 26 Issue 1, 2020. Also part of proceedings for IEEE VAST 201