VisUPI: visual analytics for University Personality Inventory data

Abstract: It is a feasible way to investigate the mental health status of college students through University Personality Inventory (UPI). However, the analysis of original UPI data is a difficult and tedious task, because the traditional software always requires the users to select and reload slices of data by hand. Also, the limited constant functions provided by the software cannot meet the various requirements of domain experts. In this paper, we propose VisUPI, a specialized visualization framework for UPI datasets, aiming at an in-depth analysis of the mental health status of college students. A circular view is firstly designed to layout the questionnaires and visualize the answers of individuals. Then, a decision tree model is employed to classify the investigated students, and a radial hierarchy chart is designed to present the relationship of different groups of students. According to the prior knowledge of UPI, we restructure the network relationship of specified questionnaires, and use the force-directed model to layout the questionnaires, enabling users to better perceive the answers of those students with serious mental health problems. Furthermore, multi-dimensional scaling is used to visualize the dissimilarity between different questionnaires, and the statistical answers are presented through bar charts in detail. Finally, the effectiveness and scalability of VisUPI are demonstrated through case studies with the real-world datasets and the domain-expert interviews. Graphical Abstract: [Figure not available: see fulltext.].