Analysis
Keywords
Exploratory data analysis, social data analysis,
information visualization, statistics, filtering
Copyright is held by the author/owner(s).
CHI 2008, April 5 – April 10, 2008, Florence, Italy ACM Classification Keywords
ACM 1-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx. H5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g.,
HCI): Miscellaneous.
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Beyond Overviews: Digging Deeper with Visual filtering works best when supported by dynamic
Filtering queries and range sliders to give users direct control.
Since users should be able to filter in as many
dimensions that exist in the data set, the interface
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should present the stack of filtered dimensions to users complicated to comprehend and use effectively, the
in a coherent manner. discoveries they can lead to can outweigh the cost of
instruction. Furthermore, in a collaborative
Integrating Statistics with Visualization environment, users can partition effort by navigating in
Even with filtering, sometimes certain phenomenon their respective areas of statistical expertise. This
cannot be found solely with visualization. Particularly statistical information will also empower users filter out
with large data sets, visualizations will not always statistically unimportant data, bringing simplicity to
highlight important trends of the underlying data. initially overwhelming visualizations. Finally, having
Statistical properties can be used to detect important statistical overviews of visual information will also help
datapoints, relationships, and clusters. Statistical users trust the resulting information, not allowing users
Figure 1. The rank-by-feature framework analysis can aid the comprehension of visualizations by to maliciously hide or distort the visual representations.
helps users find important patterns between
numerically suggesting (or confirming) visual output.
many columns in data.
Presenting boxplots, standard deviations, lower- Conclusion
triangular matrices will greatly improve the exploratory In this paper, we speculate that a richer experience on
data analysis capibilitly of these websites. social data analysis websites can be had if more
attention is paid to the exploratory capabilities.
When users are faced with data with many columns, Advanced filtering techniques allow users to step
choosing which dimensions to plot in a scatterplot can beyond overviews and take advanced paths to finding
be quite tedious and challenging. The rank-by-feature insights. Additionally, integrating the visualizations
(RBF) framework, shown in Figure 1, suggests with statistical analysis can reduce the complexity of
statistically interesting pair-wise columns that can help complex visualizations while also guiding the users to
guide users to interesting phenomenon [5]. The interesting gaps, outliers and patterns. While both of
resulting scatterplots (not pictured) appear when a user these requirements suggest an increase in the
hovers offer each cell in the matrix. When users are complexity of an interface, the richer explorative
navigating stack charts, highlighting other similar capabilities can leverage the true power of the masses:
stacks in the pattern-finding spirit of TimeSearcher [2], many explorative paths for many insights.
will help users overcome the overview displacement
distortions. When users are trying to interpret a Citations
chaotic network visualization, color-coding and filtering [1] Data360 Data360. (2007).
[2] Hochheiser, H. and Shneiderman, B. Dynamic Query
the nodes by centrality measurements in the spirit of
Tools for Time Series Data Sets, Timebox Widgets
SocialAction [3] can increase comprehension. for Interactive Exploration. Information
Similarly, relevant statistical information can also be Visualization, 3, 1 (2004), 1-18.
Figure 2. A complex network visualization displayed in scented widgets to further improve [3] Perer, A. and Shneiderman, B. Balancing Systematic
(top) can be simplified using statistical navigation [10]. and Flexible Exploration of Social Networks. IEEE
rankings, color-coding, and filtering Transactions on Visualization and Computer
(bottom). Graphics, 12, 5 (2006), 693-700.
Although statistical techniques are even more
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