ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
2015
Dynamic Opacity Optimization for Scatter Plots (1:51 min.)
Scatterplots are an effective and commonly used technique to show the relationship between two variables. However, as the number of data points increases, the chart suffers from “over-plotting” which obscures data points and makes the underlying distribution of the data difficult to discern. Reducing the opacity of the data points is an effective way to address over-plotting, however, setting the individual point opacity is a manual task performed by the chart designer. We present a user-driven model of opacity scaling for scatter plots. We built our model based on crowd-sourced responses to opacity scaling tasks using several synthetic data distributions, and then test our model on a collection of real-world data sets.
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Visual data representations leverage the power of human perception to process complex information, and through interaction, garner new insights. Our research focuses on visualizing data from a wide variety of domains and fundamentally tackles the question, what makes a visualization effective? We explore novel visual encodings and interaction techniques, multiscale approaches, and even simulation to bridge human and automated analysis of multivariate, time-series, and graph data, ultimately aiding in hypothesis generation, testing, and sense making.