Queensland Branch meeting: "MIGHTY MAPS: Showcasing estimate uncertainty"

MIGHTY MAPS: Showcasing estimate uncertainty

Maps may inform or misinform. Conveying the uncertainty associated with spatial estimates is important to prevent misinforming. Uncertainty provides a way to communicate where data is lacking or where a decision maker should focus their efforts in terms of ‘value for investment’. However, despite its importance, uncertainty is less commonly provided on/with maps.

This 2-part talk will showcase two diverse examples of incorporating uncertainty in mapping: the Australian Cancer Atlas and Vizumap.

The Australian Cancer Atlas had a mandate to display the uncertainty around each estimate in insightful and innovative ways. Released in September 2018, and freely accessible to all, it remains unique among online cancer atlases. This talk will demonstrate the novel data visualisations, intuitive map display and helpful features.

Vizumap is an R package to make visualising uncertainty in spatial data more accessible to researchers wishing to communicate uncertainty from spatial information. The methods in Vizumap include the bivariate choropleth map, map pixelation, glyph rotation, and the exceedance probability map. This talk will showcase each of these methods and demonstrate how to use the Vizumap package.

Speaker Bios

Dr Susanna Cramb is a Strategic Research Fellow at the Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation, Queensland University of Technology. She is also Vice President (Memberships), Statistical Society of Australia. Her research interests include investigating the spatial and spatio-temporal patterns of chronic disease in Queensland and across Australia. Susanna has also been recognised as a Superstar of STEM by Science and Technology, Australia.

Lydia Lucchesi is a PhD student at Australian National University. She received a Bachelor of Arts in Statistics from the University of Missouri, Columbia, USA, in 2017. Upon graduating, Lydia visited CSIRO’s Data61 to collaborate on the development of the Vizumap R package. From 2017-2019, she completed a Post-Bachelor Fellowship at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle, USA. This included a practicum experience at the National Data Management Center at the Ethiopian Public Health Institute in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. She enjoys coding in R to create data visualisations.