39-Issue 3
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Browsing 39-Issue 3 by Author "Blumenschein, Michael"
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Item Evaluating Reordering Strategies for Cluster Identification in Parallel Coordinates(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2020) Blumenschein, Michael; Zhang, Xuan; Pomerenke, David; Keim, Daniel A.; Fuchs, Johannes; Viola, Ivan and Gleicher, Michael and Landesberger von Antburg, TatianaThe ability to perceive patterns in parallel coordinates plots (PCPs) is heavily influenced by the ordering of the dimensions. While the community has proposed over 30 automatic ordering strategies, we still lack empirical guidance for choosing an appropriate strategy for a given task. In this paper, we first propose a classification of tasks and patterns and analyze which PCP reordering strategies help in detecting them. Based on our classification, we then conduct an empirical user study with 31 participants to evaluate reordering strategies for cluster identification tasks. We particularly measure time, identification quality, and the users' confidence for two different strategies using both synthetic and real-world datasets. Our results show that, somewhat unexpectedly, participants tend to focus on dissimilar rather than similar dimension pairs when detecting clusters, and are more confident in their answers. This is especially true when increasing the amount of clutter in the data. As a result of these findings, we propose a new reordering strategy based on the dissimilarity of neighboring dimension pairs.Item v-plots: Designing Hybrid Charts for the Comparative Analysis of Data Distributions(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2020) Blumenschein, Michael; Debbeler, Luka J.; Lages, Nadine C.; Renner, Britta; Keim, Daniel A.; El-Assady, Mennatallah; Viola, Ivan and Gleicher, Michael and Landesberger von Antburg, TatianaComparing data distributions is a core focus in descriptive statistics, and part of most data analysis processes across disciplines. In particular, comparing distributions entails numerous tasks, ranging from identifying global distribution properties, comparing aggregated statistics (e.g., mean values), to the local inspection of single cases. While various specialized visualizations have been proposed (e.g., box plots, histograms, or violin plots), they are not usually designed to support more than a few tasks, unless they are combined. In this paper, we present the v-plot designer; a technique for authoring custom hybrid charts, combining mirrored bar charts, difference encodings, and violin-style plots. v-plots are customizable and enable the simultaneous comparison of data distributions on global, local, and aggregation levels. Our system design is grounded in an expert survey that compares and evaluates 20 common visualization techniques to derive guidelines for the task-driven selection of appropriate visualizations. This knowledge externalization step allowed us to develop a guiding wizard that can tailor v-plots to individual tasks and particular distribution properties. Finally, we confirm the usefulness of our system design and the userguiding process by measuring the fitness for purpose and applicability in a second study with four domain and statistic experts.