User-driven Analysis of Longitudinal Health Data with Hidden Markov Models for Clinical Insights

A goal of clinical researchers is to understand the progression of a disease through a set of biomarkers. Researchers often conduct observational studies, where they collect numerous samples from selected subjects throughout multiple years. Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) can be applied to discover latent states and their transition probabilities over time. However, it is challenging for clinical researchers to interpret the outcomes and to gain insights about the disease. Thus, this demo introduces an interactive visualization system called DPVis, which was designed to help researchers to interactively explore HMM outcomes. The demo provides guidelines of how to implement the clinician-in-the-loop approach for analyzing longitudinal, observational health data with visual analytics.