Heterogeneous data pose serious challenges to data analysis tasks, including exploration and visualization. Current techniques often utilize dimensionality reductions, aggregation, or conversion to numerical values to analyze heterogeneous data. However, the effectiveness of such techniques to find subtle structures such as the presence of multiple modes or detection of outliers is hindered by the challenge to find the proper subspaces or prior knowledge to reveal the structures. In this paper, we propose a generic similarity-based exploration technique that is applicable to a wide variety of datatypes and their combinations, including heterogeneous ensembles. The proposed concept of similarity has a close connection to statistical analysis and can be deployed for summarization, revealing fine structures such as the presence of multiple modes, and detection of anomalies or outliers. We then propose a visual encoding framework that enables the exploration of a heterogeneous dataset in different levels of detail and provides insightful information about both global and local structures. We demonstrate the utility of the proposed technique using various real datasets, including ensemble data.
Another class of techniques uses special visual mapping techniques to visualize high-dimensional datasets so that the user can observe the patterns or structure in the data intuitively. Scatterplots and parallel coordinates @cite_40 are among the prominent techniques in this group. Scatterplots or SPLOM are useful for visual detection of the correlation between two variables or finding clustering of datapoints in a dataset for which pairwise similarity or distance measures are available. One of the main concerns about SPLOM visualization is its scalability in terms of the size of the dataset and also depicting the relation between more than two variables (or dimensions). In comparison to scatterplots, parallel coordinates can provide a good overview of various attributes of high-dimensional data @cite_10 . However, standard 2D parallel coordinates allow the identification of relationships only between adjacent axes. Therefore, the ordering of the axis plays a major role when the goal is to find structures in high-dimensional datasets @cite_10 .
@cite_40 @cite_10
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Scatterplot matrices (SPLOMs), parallel coordinates, and glyphs can all be used to visualize the multiple continuous variables (i.e., dependent variables or measures) in multidimensional multivariate data. However, these techniques are not well suited to visualizing many categorical variables (i.e., independent variables or dimensions). To visualize multiple categorical variables, 'hierarchical axes' that 'stack dimensions' have been used in systems like Polaris and Tableau. However, this approach does not scale well beyond a small number of categorical variables. [8] extend the matrix paradigm of the SPLOM to simultaneously visualize several categorical and continuous variables, displaying many kinds of charts in the matrix depending on the kinds of variables involved. We propose a variant of their technique, called the Generalized Plot Matrix (GPLOM). The GPLOM restricts 's technique to only three kinds of charts (scatterplots for pairs of continuous variables, heatmaps for pairs of categorical variables, and barcharts for pairings of categorical and continuous variable), in an effort to make it easier to understand. At the same time, the GPLOM extends 's work by demonstrating interactive techniques suited to the matrix of charts. We discuss the visual design and interactive features of our GPLOM prototype, including a textual search feature allowing users to quickly locate values or variables by name. We also present a user study that compared performance with Tableau and our GPLOM prototype, that found that GPLOM is significantly faster in certain cases, and not significantly slower in other cases. We introduce the parallel coordinates matrix (PCM) as the counterpart to the scatterplot matrix (SPLOM). Using a graph-theoretic approach, we determine a list of axis orderings such that all pairwise relations can be displayed without redundancy while each parallel-coordinates plot can be used independently to visualize all variables of the dataset. Therefore, existing axis-ordering algorithms, rendering techniques, and interaction methods can easily be applied to the individual parallel-coordinates plots. We demonstrate the value of the PCM in two case studies and show how it can serve as an overview visualization for parallel coordinates. Finally, we apply existing focus-and-context techniques in an interactive setup to support a detailed analysis of multivariate data. A standard approach for visualizing multivariate networks is to use one or more multidimensional views (for example, scatterplots) for selecting nodes by various metrics, possibly coordinated with a node-link view of the network. In this paper, we present three novel approaches for achieving a tighter integration of these views through hybrid techniques for multidimensional visualization, graph selection and layout. First, we present the FlowVizMenu, a radial menu containing a scatterplot that can be popped up transiently and manipulated with rapid, fluid gestures to select and modify the axes of its scatterplot. Second, the FlowVizMenu can be used to steer an attribute-driven layout of the network, causing certain nodes of a node-link diagram to move toward their corresponding positions in a scatterplot while others can be positioned manually or by force-directed layout. Third, we describe a novel hybrid approach that combines a scatterplot matrix (SPLOM) and parallel coordinates called the Parallel Scatterplot Matrix (P-SPLOM), which can be used to visualize and select features within the network. We also describe a novel arrangement of scatterplots called the Scatterplot Staircase (SPLOS) that requires less space than a traditional scatterplot matrix. Initial user feedback is reported. High-dimensional data visualization is receiving increasing interest because of the growing abundance of highdimensional datasets. To understand such datasets, visualization of the structures present in the data, such as clusters, can be an invaluable tool. Structures may be present in the full high-dimensional space, as well as in its subspaces. Two widely used methods to visualize high-dimensional data are the scatter plot matrix (SPM) and the parallel coordinate plot (PCP). SPM allows a quick overview of the structures present in pairwise combinations of dimensions. On the other hand, PCP has the potential to visualize not only bi-dimensional structures but also higher dimensional ones. A problem with SPM is that it suffers from crowding and clutter which makes interpretation hard. Approaches to reduce clutter are available in the literature, based on changing the order of the dimensions. However, usually this reordering has a high computational complexity. For effective visualization of high-dimensional structures, also PCP requires a proper ordering of the dimensions. In this paper, we propose methods for reordering dimensions in PCP in such a way that high-dimensional structures (if present) become easier to perceive. We also present a method for dimension reordering in SPM which yields results that are comparable to those of existing approaches, but at a much lower computational cost. Our approach is based on finding relevant subspaces for clustering using a quality criterion and cluster information. The quality computation and cluster detection are done in image space, using connected morphological operators. We demonstrate the potential of our approach for synthetic and astronomical datasets, and show that our method compares favorably with a number of existing approaches.