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Visual Analytics - Think Pair Share

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9 views

Visual Analytics - Think Pair Share

Uploaded by

2217055
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Visual Analytics:

Visual analytics encompasses a variety of techniques for visualizing


complex data structures. Networks and trees, heat maps, tree maps, color
mapping, and other visual channels are some of the key techniques used to
represent and interact with data.

Network

The dataset type of networks is well suited for specifying that there is
some kind of relationship between two or more items in a network is often
called a node. A link is a relation between two items. For example, in an
articulated social network the nodes are people, and links mean friendship. In a
gene interaction network, the nodes are genes, and links between them mean
that these genes have been observed to interact with each other. In a computer
network, the nodes are computers, and the links represent the ability to send
messages directly between two computers using physical cables or a wireless
connection.
Network nodes can have associated attributes, just like items in a table.
In addition, the links themselves could also be considered to have attributes
associated with them; these may be partly or wholly disjoint from the node
attributes.
It is again important to distinguish between the abstract concept of a
network and any particular visual layout of that network where the nodes and
edges have particular spatial positions. This chapter concentrates on the former.

Trees

Networks with hierarchical structure are more specifically called trees.


In contrast to a general network, trees do not have cycles: each child node has
only one parent node pointing to it. One example of a tree is the organization
chart of a company, showing who reports to whom; another example is a tree
showing the evolutionary relationships between species in the biological tree of
life, where the child nodes of humans and monkeys both share the same parent
node of primates.

Heat Maps

A heat map is a two-dimensional representation of data in which various


values are represented by colors. A simple heat map provides an immediate
visual summary of information across two axes, allowing users to quickly grasp
the most important or relevant data points. More elaborate heat maps allow the
viewer to understand complex data sets.
A heat map is a way to represent data points in a data set in a visual
manner. All heat maps share one thing in common -- they use different colors or
different shades of the same color to represent different values and to
communicate the relationships that may exist between the variables plotted on
the x-axis and y-axis. Usually, a darker color or shade represents a higher or
greater quantity of the value being represented in the heat map.
For instance, a heat map showing the rain distribution (range of values) of a city
grouped by month may use varying shades of red, yellow and blue. The months
may be mapped on the y axis and the rain ranges on the x axis. The lightest
color (i.e., blue) would represent the lower rainfall. In contrast, yellow and red
would represent increasing rainfall values, with red indicating the highest
values.
The changing colors across the two axes will reveal patterns in one or
both variables and whether there are relationships between them. Thus, there
may be blues on the heat map for some months, indicating that rainfall was in
the lower range(s) in these months. A few yellows and reds for some other
months would show higher rainfall for those months. From this simple heat
map, any user can see how much rain the city received in each month and
whether it was higher or lower than the rainfall in other months.

Tree maps
Treemaps are ideal for displaying large amounts of hierarchically
structured (tree-structured) data. The space in the visualization is split up into
rectangles that are sized and ordered by a quantitative variable.
The levels in the hierarchy of the treemap are visualized as rectangles
containing other rectangles. Each set of rectangles on the same level in the
hierarchy represents a column or an expression in a data table. Each individual
rectangle on a level in the hierarchy represents a category in a column. For
example, a rectangle representing a continent may contain several rectangles
representing countries in that continent. Each rectangle representing a country
may in turn contain rectangles representing cities in these countries. You can
create a treemap hierarchy directly in the visualization, or use an already
defined hierarchy. To learn more, see the section To Create a Treemap
Hierarchy.
A number of different algorithms can be used to determine how the
rectangles in a treemap should be sized and ordered. The treemap in Spotfire
uses a squarified algorithm.
The rectangles in the treemap range in size from the top left corner of
the visualization to the bottom right corner, with the largest rectangle positioned
in the top left corner and the smallest rectangle in the bottom right corner. For
hierarchies, that is, when the rectangles are nested, the same ordering of the
rectangles is repeated for each rectangle in the treemap. This means that the
size, and thereby also position, of a rectangle that contains other rectangles is
decided by the sum of the areas of the contained rectangles.
Example:
Below is a treemap where the rectangles represent cities and are sized and
colored by the column Sales. In this case, the aggregation method Sum was
selected for the Sales column. This treemap only contains data on one level.

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