Title
Evolutionary visual exploration: evaluation with expert users
Abstract
We present an Evolutionary Visual Exploration (EVE) system that combines visual analytics with stochastic optimisation to aid the exploration of multidimensional datasets characterised by a large number of possible views or projections. Starting from dimensions whose values are automatically calculated by a PCA, an interactive evolutionary algorithm progressively builds (or evolves) non-trivial viewpoints in the form of linear and non-linear dimension combinations, to help users discover new interesting views and relationships in their data. The criteria for evolving new dimensions is not known a priori and are partially specified by the user via an interactive interface: (i) The user selects views with meaningful or interesting visual patterns and provides a satisfaction score. (ii) The system calibrates a fitness function (optimised by the evolutionary algorithm) to take into account the user input, and then calculates new views. Our method leverages automatic tools to detect interesting visual features and human interpretation to derive meaning, validate the findings and guide the exploration without having to grasp advanced statistical concepts. To validate our method, we built a prototype tool (EvoGraphDice) as an extension of an existing scatterplot matrix inspection tool, and conducted an observational study with five domain experts. Our results show that EvoGraphDice can help users quantify qualitative hypotheses and try out different scenarios to dynamically transform their data. Importantly, it allowed our experts to think laterally, better formulate their research questions and build new hypotheses for further investigation.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1111/cgf.12090
Comput. Graph. Forum
Keywords
Field
DocType
new interesting view,new hypothesis,new dimension,visual analytics,automatic tool,user input,interesting visual feature,evolutionary algorithm,new view,interesting visual pattern,expert user,evolutionary visual exploration
Computer vision,GRASP,Evolutionary algorithm,Computer science,Viewpoints,A priori and a posteriori,Visual analytics,Fitness function,Artificial intelligence,Machine learning,Visual patterns
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
32
3
0167-7055
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
11
0.55
13
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
N. Boukhelifa1110.55
W. Cancino2110.55
Anastasia Bezerianos367437.75
Evelyne Lutton4894134.68