Section: Research Program

Scientific Foundations

The scientific foundations of Visual Analytics lie primarily in the domains of Visualization and Data Mining. Indirectly, it inherits from other established domains such as graphic design, Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA), statistics, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), and Psychology.

The use of graphic representation to understand abstract data is a goal Visual Analytics shares with Tukey's Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA)  [67], graphic designers such as Bertin  [54] and Tufte  [66], and HCI researchers in the field of Information Visualization  [53].

EDA is complementary to classical statistical analysis. Classical statistics starts from a problem, gathers data, designs a model and performs an analysis to reach a conclusion about whether the data follows the model. While EDA also starts with a problem and data, it is most useful before we have a model; rather, we perform visual analysis to discover what kind of model might apply to it. However, statistical validation is not always required with EDA; since often the results of visual analysis are sufficiently clear-cut that statistics are unnecessary.

Visual Analytics relies on a process similar to EDA, but expands its scope to include more sophisticated graphics and areas where considerable automated analysis is required before the visual analysis takes place. This richer data analysis has its roots in the domain of Data Mining, while the advanced graphics and interactive exploration techniques come from the scientific fields of Data Visualization and HCI, as well as the expertise of professions such as cartography and graphic designers who have long worked to create effective methods for graphically conveying information.

The books of the cartographer Bertin and the graphic designer Tufte are full of rules drawn from their experience about how the meaning of data can be best conveyed visually. Their purpose is to find effective visual representation that describe a data set but also (mainly for Bertin) to discover structure in the data by using the right mappings from abstract dimensions in the data to visual ones.

For the last 25 years, the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) has also shown that interacting with visual representations of data in a tight perception-action loop improves the time and level of understanding of data sets. Information Visualization is the branch of HCI that has studied visual representations suitable to understanding and interaction methods suitable to navigating and drilling down on data. The scientific foundations of Information Visualization come from theories about perception, action and interaction.

Several theories of perception are related to information visualization such as the “Gestalt” principles, Gibson's theory of visual perception  [59] and Triesman's “preattentive processing” theory  [65]. We use them extensively but they only have a limited accuracy for predicting the effectiveness of novel visual representations in interactive settings.

Information Visualization emerged from HCI when researchers realized that interaction greatly enhanced the perception of visual representations.

To be effective, interaction should take place in an interactive loop faster than 100ms. For small data sets, it is not difficult to guarantee that analysis, visualization and interaction steps occur in this time, permitting smooth data analysis and navigation. For larger data sets, more computation should be performed to reduce the data size to a size that may be visualized effectively.

In 2002, we showed that the practical limit of InfoVis was on the order of 1 million items displayed on a screen  [57]. Although screen technologies have improved rapidly since then, eventually we will be limited by the physiology of our vision system: about 20 millions receptor cells (rods and cones) on the retina. Another problem will be the limits of human visual attention, as suggested by our 2006 study on change blindness in large and multiple displays  [55]. Therefore, visualization alone cannot let us understand very large data sets. Other techniques such as aggregation or sampling must be used to reduce the visual complexity of the data to the scale of human perception.

Abstracting data to reduce its size to what humans can understand is the goal of Data Mining research. It uses data analysis and machine learning techniques. The scientific foundations of these techniques revolve around the idea of finding a good model for the data. Unfortunately, the more sophisticated techniques for finding models are complex, and the algorithms can take a long time to run, making them unsuitable for an interactive environment. Furthermore, some models are too complex for humans to understand; so the results of data mining can be difficult or impossible to understand directly.

Unlike pure Data Mining systems, a Visual Analytics system provides analysis algorithms and processes compatible with human perception and understandable to human cognition. The analysis should provide understandable results quickly, even if they are not ideal. Instead of running to a predefined threshold, algorithms and programs should be designed to allow trading speed for quality and show the tradeoffs interactively. This is not a temporary requirement: it will be with us even when computers are much faster, because good quality algorithms are at least quadratic in time (e.g. hierarchical clustering methods). Visual Analytics systems need different algorithms for different phases of the work that can trade speed for quality in an understandable way.

Designing novel interaction and visualization techniques to explore huge data sets is an important goal and requires solving hard problems, but how can we assess whether or not our techniques and systems provide real improvements? Without this answer, we cannot know if we are heading in the right direction. This is why we have been actively involved in the design of evaluation methods for information visualization  [63], [62], [60], [61], [58]. For more complex systems, other methods are required. For these we want to focus on longitudinal evaluation methods while still trying to improve controlled experiments.