Mesmerizing Movement

Nathan Yau of Flowing Data has put together an enthralling dynamic display of a Markov Chain of 1000 points simulating US Americans as they move through activities during their day. Color indicates activity and as this activity changes, the points move to another cluster. At rush hours and lunch there is a flurry of movement as points move from home, work, eating, leisure, etc. Leisure collects most points in the early evening, until late at night when most end up in a large yellow sleeping cluster on the right. It's captivating to watch the swirl of activity but also hard to follow anything but the biggest patterns of movement. To address this he also has static views of the paths the points take.

Eating, work, housework, and even leisure dominate this lunch hour view. See more here.

Dynamic Visualization of Markov Chains

Here is a visual demonstration of Markov Chains by Victor Powell. We've seen his work before in demonstrating conditional probability. These dynamic views of one, two, and then many state Markov Chains.

The program allows for varying transition probabilities, varying speed of travel between the states, and a realization of the resulting time series of state visits. Another very nice visualization.