UNIVERSITY EXAMINATIONS: 2018/2019
EXAMINATION FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF SCIENCE IN
DATA ANALYTICS
MDA5304 VISUAL ANALYTICS SYSTEM ARCHITECHURE
DATE: APRIL 2019 TIME: 2 HOURS
INSTRUCTIONS: Answer Question One & ANY OTHER TWO questions.
QUESTION ONE (20 MARKS) – COMPULSORY QUESTION
Visual analytics has been widely studied in the past decade. One key to make visual
analytics practical for both research and industrial applications is the appropriate
definition and implementation of the visual analytics pipeline that provides effective
abstractions for designing and implementing visual analytics systems.
a) REVIEW previous work on visual analytics pipelines.
(8 Marks)
b) DISCUSS the individual modules that make up these pipelines.
(8 Marks)
c) COMPARE the commonalities and the differences among them.
(4 Marks)
QUESTION TWO (20 MARKS)
Visual analytics has lately been differentiating the field of Information Visualization. Its
definition is “Visual analytics is the science of analytical reasoning facilitated by
interactive visual interfaces”.
DESCRIBE what you feel are aspects that this new field includes and which
distinguishes it from Information Visualization
QUESTION THREE (20 MARKS)
Evaluating visual analytics systems is challenging because users need to know that the
system supports both basic information retrieval tasks as well as complex reasoning and
exploration.
DISCUSS a method for evaluating visualizations using both tasks and exploration.
QUESTION FOUR (20 MARKS)
Visual analytics is the science of marrying interactive visualizations and analytic
algorithms to support exploratory knowledge discovery in large datasets.
PROVIDE an argument (for or against) that that seeks to justify the shift from a ‘human
in the loop’ philosophy for visual analytics to a ‘human is the loop’ viewpoint.
