Guidance for Interactive Visual Analysis in Multivariate Time Series Preprocessing

Multivariate time series analysis presents significant challenges due to its dynamism, heterogeneity, and scalability. Given this, preprocessing is considered a crucial step to ensure analytical quality. However, this phase falls solely on the user without system support, resulting in wasted time, subjective decision-making, and cognitive overload, and is prone to errors that affect the quality of the results. This situation reflects the lack of interactive visual analysis approaches that effectively integrate preprocessing with guidance mechanisms. The main objective of this work was to design and develop a guidance system for interactive visual analysis in multivariate time series preprocessing, allowing users to understand, evaluate, and adapt their decisions in this critical phase of the analytical workflow. To this end, we propose a new guide-based approach that incorporates recommendations, explainability, and interactive visualization. This approach is embodied in the GUIAVisWeb tool, which organizes a workflow through tasks, subtasks, and preprocessing algorithms; recommends appropriate components through consensus validation and predictive evaluation; and explains the justification for each recommendation through visual representations. The proposal was evaluated in two dimensions: (i) quality of the guidance, with an average score of 6.19 on the Likert scale (1-7), and (ii) explainability of the algorithm recommendations, with an average score of 5.56 on the Likert scale (1-6). In addition, a case study was developed with air quality data that demonstrated the functionality of the tool and its ability to support more informed, transparent, and effective preprocessing decisions.