The increasingly rapid growth of data production and the consequent need to explore data to obtain answers to the most varied questions have promoted the development of tools to facilitate the manipulation and construction of data visualizations. However, building useful data visualizations is not a trivial task: it may involve a large number of subtle decisions that require experience from their designer. In this paper, we present VisMaker, a visualization recommender tool that uses a set of rules to present visualization recommendations organized and described through questions, in order to facilitate the understanding of the recommendations and assisting the visual exploration process. We carried out two studies comparing our tool with Voyager 2 and analyzed some aspects of the use of tools. We collected feedback from participants to identify the advantages and disadvantages of our recommendation approach. As a result, we gathered comments to help improve the development of tools in this domain.
Recommender system exists everywhere in the business world. From Goodreads to TikTok, customers of internet products become more addicted to the products thanks to the technology. Industrial practitioners focus on increasing the technical accuracy of recommender systems while at same time balancing other factors such as diversity and serendipity. In spite of the length of the research and development history of recommender systems, there has been little discussion on how to take advantage of visualization techniques to facilitate the algorithmic design of the technology. In this paper, we use …
Choosing a suitable visualization for data is a difficult task. Current data visualization recommender systems exist to aid in choosing a visualization, yet suffer from issues such as low accessibility and indecisiveness. In this study, we first define a step-by-step guide on how to build a data visualization recommender system. We then use this guide to create a model for a data visualization recommender system for non-experts that aims to resolve the issues of current solutions. The result is a question-based model that uses a decision tree and a data visualization classification hierarchy i…
Machine learning is a promising approach to visualization recommendation due to its high scalability and representational power. Researchers can create a neural network to predict visualizations from input data by training it over a corpus of datasets and visualization examples. However, these machine learning models can reflect trends in their training data that may negatively affect their performance. Our research project aims to address training bias in machine learning visualization recommendation systems by identifying trends in the training data through statistical analysis.
Studying human factors has gained a lot of interest in recommender systems research recently. User experience plays a vital role in tourism recommender systems since user satisfaction is the main factor that guarantees the success of such recommender systems. In this work, we have designed and implemented a destination recommender system in which the recommendations adapt instantly based on the user preferences. The recommendations can be explored on a world map with additional information. This interface addresses common visualization challenges in recommender systems, such as transparency, j…
More visualization systems are simplifying the data analysis process by automatically suggesting relevant visualizations. However, little work has been done to understand if users trust these automated recommendations. In this paper, we present the results of a crowd-sourced study exploring preferences and perceived quality of recommendations that have been positioned as either human-curated or algorithmically generated. We observe that while participants initially prefer human recommenders, their actions suggest an indifference for recommendation source when evaluating visualization recommend…
Embeddings are ubiquitous in machine learning, appearing in recommender systems, NLP, and many other applications. Researchers and developers often need to explore the properties of a specific embedding, and one way to analyze embeddings is to visualize them. We present the Embedding Projector, a tool for interactive visualization and interpretation of embeddings.
Animated transitions help viewers follow changes between related visualizations. Specifying effective animations demands significant effort: authors must select the elements and properties to animate, provide transition parameters, and coordinate the timing of stages. To facilitate this process, we present Gemini, a declarative grammar and recommendation system for animated transitions between single-view statistical graphics. Gemini specifications define transition "steps" in terms of high-level visual components (marks, axes, legends) and composition rules to synchronize and concatenate step…
Visualizations of tabular data are widely used; understanding their effectiveness in different task and data contexts is fundamental to scaling their impact. However, little is known about how basic tabular data visualizations perform across varying data analysis tasks and data attribute types. In this paper, we report results from a crowdsourced experiment to evaluate the effectiveness of five visualization types --- Table, Line Chart, Bar Chart, Scatterplot, and Pie Chart --- across ten common data analysis tasks and three data attribute types using two real-world datasets. We found the effe…
Increased access to mobile devices motivates the need to design communicative visualizations that are responsive to varying screen sizes. However, relatively little design guidance or tooling is currently available to authors. We contribute a detailed characterization of responsive visualization strategies in communication-oriented visualizations, identifying 76 total strategies by analyzing 378 pairs of large screen (LS) and small screen (SS) visualizations from online articles and reports. Our analysis distinguishes between the Targets of responsive visualization, referring to what elements …
Authors often transform a large screen visualization for smaller displays through rescaling, aggregation and other techniques when creating visualizations for both desktop and mobile devices (i.e., responsive visualization). However, transformations can alter relationships or patterns implied by the large screen view, requiring authors to reason carefully about what information to preserve while adjusting their design for the smaller display. We propose an automated approach to approximating the loss of support for task-oriented visualization insights (identification, comparison, and trend) in…
MIT Media Lab（麻省理工学院媒体实验室）；MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory（麻省理工学院计算机科学与人工智能实验室）
Data visualization should be accessible for all analysts with data, not just the few with technical expertise. Visualization recommender systems aim to lower the barrier to exploring basic visualizations by automatically generating results for analysts to search and select, rather than manually specify. Here, we demonstrate a novel machine learning-based approach to visualization recommendation that learns visualization design choices from a large corpus of datasets and associated visualizations. First, we identify five key design choices made by analysts while creating visualizations, such as…
Cloud-based visualization services have made visual analytics accessible to a much wider audience than ever before. Systems such as Tableau have started to amass increasingly large repositories of analytical knowledge in the form of interactive visualization workbooks. When shared, these collections can form a visual analytic knowledge base. However, as the size of a collection increases, so does the difficulty in finding relevant information. Content-based recommendation (CBR) systems could help analysts in finding and managing workbooks relevant to their interests. Toward this goal, we focus…
Current tools for exploratory data analysis (EDA) require users to manually select data attributes, statistical computations and visual encodings. This can be daunting for large-scale, complex data. We introduce Foresight, a visualization recommender system that helps the user rapidly explore large high-dimensional datasets through "guideposts." A guidepost is a visualization corresponding to a pronounced instance of a statistical descriptor of the underlying data, such as a strong linear correlation between two attributes, high skewness or concentration about the mean of a single attribute, o…
Do We Care About Personalization and Explainability? An Interview Study with News Recommendation Engineers
University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）；Jheronimus Academy of Data Science（耶罗尼穆斯数据科学学院）；Birla Institute of Technology & Science, Pilani（比拉理工学院皮拉尼校区）；Eindhoven University of Technology（埃因霍温理工大学）
In micro-blogging platforms, people connect and interact with others. However, due to cognitive biases, they tend to interact with like-minded people and read agreeable information only. Many efforts to make people connect with those who think differently have not worked well. In this paper, we hypothesize, first, that previous approaches have not worked because they have been direct -- they have tried to explicitly connect people with those having opposing views on sensitive issues. Second, that neither recommendation or presentation of information by themselves are enough to encourage behavi…
This paper introduces semi-automatic data tours to aid the exploration of complex networks. Exploring networks requires significant effort and expertise and can be time-consuming and challenging. Distinct from guidance and recommender systems for visual analytics, we provide a set of goal-oriented tours for network overview, ego-network analysis, community exploration, and other tasks. Based on interviews with five network analysts, we developed a user interface (NetworkNarratives) and 10 example tours. The interface allows analysts to navigate an interactive slideshow featuring facts about th…
