We are working with Parininihi ki Waitotara (PKW), a Māori organisation based in Taranaki. Like many other organisations, PKW have shareholders who transfer shares over time, typically between family members. They wish to better understand these transfers by creating visualisations of the 'flow' of shares between people over time. Creating an easy-to-follow visualisation requires careful layout of the people (nodes) to avoid a spaghetti-style mishmash of flows. We wish to develop optimisation models to create a visually-optimal network representation. This is an example of a graph-layout problem. These flow graphs are known as Sankey diagrams.
We have been working on visualisations that use the Unity games engine and C#. These have focussed on showing early PkW shareholders. We wish to extend and enhance these visualisations by creating appealing interactive visualisations that show a range of data sets, including the share transfers over times. We have not previously generated Sankey diagrams using these 3D visualisation tools.
A second problem faced by PKW and other organisations is the handling of missing data. For example, a company typically reports its shareholding annually, but does not report the transfers that occurred during the year. Groupings of shares are typically transferred in predictable ways, such as being transferred to a single individual, or being split evenly between a small number of individuals. These patterns make it possible to deduce likely share transfers, and thus infer the missing share transfer data.
If time allows, we also wish to experiment with modern Web-based visualisations including WebGL and WebAssembly.
Undergraduate
This project will develop visualisation software and implement optimisation algoritms that optimise the visual layout of this network. The project will also develop new algorithms that infer transfers that are missing in the data. These algorithms will be tested by deleting transfers to create synthetic datasets that can then be re-constructed.
None
Signal Processin (405.722, Lab)