Analysis Guided Visual Exploration of Multivariate Data

Yang, Di

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Analysis Guided Visual Exploration of Multivariate Data

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Visualization systems traditionally focus on graphical representation of information. They tend not to provide integrated analytical services that could aid users in tackling complex knowledge discovery tasks. UsersÂ¡Â¯ exploration in such environments is usually impeded due to several problems: 1) Valuable information is hard to discover, when too much data is visualized on the screen. 2) They have to manage and organize their discoveries off line, because no systematic discovery management mechanism exists. 3) Their discoveries based on visual exploration alone may lack accuracy. 4) They have no convenient access to the important knowledge learned by other users. To tackle these problems, it has been recognized that analytical tools must be introduced into visualization systems. In this paper, we present a novel analysis-guided exploration system, called the Nugget Management System (NMS). It leverages the collaborative effort of human comprehensibility and machine computations to facilitate usersÂ¡Â¯ visual exploration process. Specifically, NMS first extracts the valuable information (nuggets) hidden in datasets based on the interests of users. Given that similar nuggets may be re-discovered by different users, NMS consolidates the nugget candidate set by clustering based on their semantic similarity. To solve the problem of inaccurate discoveries, data mining techniques are applied to refine the nuggets to best represent the patterns existing in datasets. Lastly, the resulting well-organized nugget pool is used to guide usersÂ¡Â¯ exploration. To evaluate the effectiveness of NMS, we integrated NMS into XmdvTool, a freeware multivariate visualization system. User studies were performed to compare the usersÂ¡Â¯ efficiency and accuracy of finishing tasks on real datasets, with and without the help of NMS. Our user studies confirmed the effectiveness of NMS. Keywords: Visual Analytics, Visual Knowledge

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