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Register a new userVizML: A Machine Learning Approach to Visualization Recommendation
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Added by
Kevin Hu
Publication date
2018
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
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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 selecting a visualization type and choosing to encode a column along the X- or Y-axis. We train models to predict these design choices using one million dataset-visualization pairs collected from a popular online visualization platform. Neural networks predict these design choices with high accuracy compared to baseline models. We report and interpret feature importances from one of these baseline models. To evaluate the generalizability and uncertainty of our approach, we benchmark with a crowdsourced test set, and show that the performance of our model is comparable to human performance when predicting consensus visualization type, and exceeds that of other ML-based systems.
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Visualization recommendation systems simplify exploratory data analysis (EDA) and make understanding data more accessible to users of all skill levels by automatically generating visualizations for users to explore. However, most existing visualization recommendation systems focus on ranking all visualizations into a single list or set of groups based on particular attributes or encodings. This global ranking makes it difficult and time-consuming for users to find the most interesting or relevant insights. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel class of visualization recommendation systems that automatically rank and recommend both groups of related insights as well as the most important insights within each group. Our proposed approach combines results from many different learning-based methods to discover insights automatically. A key advantage is that this approach generalizes to a wide variety of attribute types such as categorical, numerical, and temporal, as well as complex non-trivial combinations of these different attribute types. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we implemented a new insight-centric visualization recommendation system, SpotLight, which generates and ranks annotated visualizations to explain each insight. We conducted a user study with 12 participants and two datasets which showed that users are able to quickly understand and find relevant insights in unfamiliar data.
Visualization recommendation or automatic visualization generation can significantly lower the barriers for general users to rapidly create effective data visualizations, especially for those users without a background in data visualizations. However, existing rule-based approaches require tedious manual specifications of visualization rules by visualization experts. Other machine learning-based approaches often work like black-box and are difficult to understand why a specific visualization is recommended, limiting the wider adoption of these approaches. This paper fills the gap by presenting KG4Vis, a knowledge graph (KG)-based approach for visualization recommendation. It does not require manual specifications of visualization rules and can also guarantee good explainability. Specifically, we propose a framework for building knowledge graphs, consisting of three types of entities (i.e., data features, data columns and visualization design choices) and the relations between them, to model the mapping rules between data and effective visualizations. A TransE-based embedding technique is employed to learn the embeddings of both entities and relations of the knowledge graph from existing dataset-visualization pairs. Such embeddings intrinsically model the desirable visualization rules. Then, given a new dataset, effective visualizations can be inferred from the knowledge graph with semantically meaningful rules. We conducted extensive evaluations to assess the proposed approach, including quantitative comparisons, case studies and expert interviews. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
Inspired by the great success of machine learning (ML), researchers have applied ML techniques to visualizations to achieve a better design, development, and evaluation of visualizations. This branch of studies, known as ML4VIS, is gaining increasing research attention in recent years. To successfully adapt ML techniques for visualizations, a structured understanding of the integration of ML4VISis needed. In this paper, we systematically survey 88 ML4VIS studies, aiming to answer two motivating questions: what visualization processes can be assisted by ML? and how ML techniques can be used to solve visualization problems? This survey reveals seven main processes where the employment of ML techniques can benefit visualizations:Data Processing4VIS, Data-VIS Mapping, InsightCommunication, Style Imitation, VIS Interaction, VIS Reading, and User Profiling. The seven processes are related to existing visualization theoretical models in an ML4VIS pipeline, aiming to illuminate the role of ML-assisted visualization in general visualizations.Meanwhile, the seven processes are mapped into main learning tasks in ML to align the capabilities of ML with the needs in visualization. Current practices and future opportunities of ML4VIS are discussed in the context of the ML4VIS pipeline and the ML-VIS mapping. While more studies are still needed in the area of ML4VIS, we hope this paper can provide a stepping-stone for future exploration. A web-based interactive browser of this survey is available at https://ml4vis.github.io
People naturally bring their prior beliefs to bear on how they interpret the new information, yet few formal models exist for accounting for the influence of users prior beliefs in interactions with data presentations like visualizations. We demonstrate a Bayesian cognitive model for understanding how people interpret visualizations in light of prior beliefs and show how this model provides a guide for improving visualization evaluation. In a first study, we show how applying a Bayesian cognition model to a simple visualization scenario indicates that peoples judgments are consistent with a hypothesis that they are doing approximate Bayesian inference. In a second study, we evaluate how sensitive our observations of Bayesian behavior are to different techniques for eliciting people subjective distributions, and to different datasets. We find that people dont behave consistently with Bayesian predictions for large sample size datasets, and this difference cannot be explained by elicitation technique. In a final study, we show how normative Bayesian inference can be used as an evaluation framework for visualizations, including of uncertainty.
Visualization recommendation seeks to generate, score, and recommend to users useful visualizations automatically, and are fundamentally important for exploring and gaining insights into a new or existing dataset quickly. In this work, we propose the first end-to-end ML-based visualization recommendation system that takes as input a large corpus of datasets and visualizations, learns a model based on this data. Then, given a new unseen dataset from an arbitrary user, the model automatically generates visualizations for that new dataset, derive scores for the visualizations, and output a list of recommended visualizations to the user ordered by effectiveness. We also describe an evaluation framework to quantitatively evaluate visualization recommendation models learned from a large corpus of visualizations and datasets. Through quantitative experiments, a user study, and qualitative analysis, we show that our end-to-end ML-based system recommends more effective and useful visualizations compared to existing state-of-the-art rule-based systems. Finally, we observed a strong preference by the human experts in our user study towards the visualizations recommended by our ML-based system as opposed to the rule-based system (5.92 from a 7-point Likert scale compared to only 3.45).
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