P18ITI2206-DATA VISUALIZATION

UNIT 1 – PART 1

Dr. P C THIRUMAL
Department of Information Technology
Data Visualization- Objective
• The goal of information visualization is the unveiling
of the underlying structure of large or abstract data
sets using visual representations that utilize the
powerful processing capabilities of the human visual
perceptual system. Information visualization is an
exciting topic, and the last decade has witnessed
the development of many interesting ideas about
how to visualize abstract information.
• This course will also have a focus on how to present
information clearly and effectively

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 Data Visualization

“Use a picture. It’s worth a thousand words.” Tess Flanders,

Journalist and Editor, Syracuse Post Standard, 1911.

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 Data Visualization
Choice of physical forms like line, bar, pie-chart

Choice of color, annotations,

interactive features

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Data Visualization

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Using our eyes to explore and make sense of data

Two Driving forces:

 Graphics capable computers
 Readily accessible data

Quote from John W Tukey:The greatest value of a picture is

when it forces us to notice what we never expected to see .
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 Visualization: Visual representation of information

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Why Use Computers to Visualize Data?

When the data size is big, it is difficult to do it

manually

Computers with appropriate software enables dynamic dialogue

between analyst and the data.
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Amplify Cognition-Example: Multiplication
Mind calculation

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Example of Amplifying Cognition: "The Game of 15“ & Tic Tae Toe

Easy. Bcos of visual

representation

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Definition
• “The use of images to represent information . . . is only now becoming properly appreciated
for the benefits it can bring to business. It provides a powerful means both to make sense of
data and to then communicate what we’ve discovered to others.”

• Information visualization, the art of representing data in a way that it is easy to understand
and to manipulate, can help us make sense of information and thus make it useful in our
lives. From business decision making to simple route navigation – there’s a huge (and
growing) need for data to be presented so that it delivers value.

• Information visualization is used to discover new insights and knowledge from abstract data
through graphical means; and
• Information visualization can be considered a representation of data that amplifies
cognition.
• Information visualization or information visualisation is the study of (interactive)
visual representations of abstract data to reinforce human cognition. The abstract data
include both numerical and non-numerical data, such as text and geographic information.

• Visualization provides an interface between two powerful information processing systems—

the human mind and the modern computer. Visualization is the process of transforming
data, information, and knowledge into visual form making use of humans’ natural visual
capabilities. With effective visual interfaces we can interact with large volumes of data
rapidly and effectively to discover hidden characteristics,
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What is Visualization?

• Visualization is any technique for creating images,

diagrams, or animations to communicate a
message.
• Visualization through visual imagery has been an
effective way to communicate both abstract and
concrete ideas since the dawn of man.
• Cave paintings
• Hieroglyphs
• Maps
• …

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Brief History

• First known map: 12th century (Tegarden,1999)

• First presentation graphics: William Playfair (1786)
• Multidimensional representations appeared in 19th
century (Tufte, 1983)
• Examples:
• William Playfair (1821) – Chart showing at one view the
price of the quarter of wheat, & wages of labor by the
week, from the year 1565 to 1821
• John Snow (1854) – Cholera Map in London
• Charles Joseph Minard (1861) – Napoleon and The Russian
Campaign of 1812
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Brief History
The Line chart indicates the Weekly wages whereas the bar chart indicates the price of quarter of wheat over
the years.

• Time-series comparison, aimed to show wheat price declined regarding the increase of wages
• Integration of bar charts and line graph
William Playfair (1821)
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Brief History
For the 1854 cholera outbreak in London's Broad Street region, he presented two maps.

John Snow mapped the cholera cases on

the map. The cases were clustered
around the pump in Broad street.

• Each death case is a bar

• “Spot map” – Geo-spatial based
mapping

John Snow (1854)

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 In the nineteenth century it was believed that the disease was transmitted and spread
by a ‘bad air’ or ‘bad smells’ from rotting organic matter. This thinking dominated official
medical and government statements and the recently created General Board of Health
was amongst those that believed in this theory. But it was not until 1854 that the
physician John Snow (1813-1858) made a major contribution to fighting cholera when he
was able to demonstrate a link between cholera and the contaminated drinking water
through his pioneering studies.

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Charles Minard’s Flow Map of Napoleon’s Russian
Campaign of 1812

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It displays 6 types of data in 2 dimensions:
• the number of Napoleon's troops;
• the distance travelled;
• temperature;
• latitude and longitude;
• direction of travel;
• and location relative to specific dates without making mention of Napoleon.

Looking at the map a little deeper, there are 2 paths or flows depicted:
The thicker tan band is Napoleon's army marching towards the Polish-Russian border.
The black band is the army retreating.

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Brief History

In this visualization, Minard visualized:

• Napoleon’s marching and retreat routes
Charles Joseph Minard (1861)
• Army Size
• Temperature during retreat
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Brief History

• Modern Visualization
• 1985: NSF Workshop on Scientific Visualization
• 1987: Special issue of Computer Graphics on Visualization in
Scientific Computing
• 1990: IEEE 1st visualization conference
• 2000s: Public media started to integrate infographics into TV news,
newspaper/ magazine publication
• 2004: Pak Chung Wong and J. Thomas (2004). ”Visual Analytics”.
in: IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, Volume 24, Issue 5,
Sept.-Oct. 2004 Page(s): 20–21.
• Visualizations become popular on social networks
• Techniques such as HTML5, CSS3 enabled interactive visualizations
on mobile devices

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History
• The first author, who dedicated his book (The Visual
Display of Quantitative Information, 1983) to
information visualization, was E. R. Tufte, political
economist and statistician from Yale and Princeton
University and the member of American Statistical
Association.
• He is considered as a founder of this new discipline.

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Why Visualize Data?
• To understand some phenomena better

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Why Use Visualization?

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Pre-Requisites for Enlightening Analysis

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Aptitudes and Attitudes of Effective Analysts
• Interested
• Curious
• Self motivated
• Open minded and flexible
• Imaginative
• Skeptical
• Aware of What’s worthwhile
• Methodical
• Capable of spotting patterns
• Analytical
• Synthetical
• Familiar with the data
• Skilled in the practices of data analysis
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Traits of Meaningful Data
• High Volume
• Historical
• Consistent
• Multivariate
• Atomic
• Clean
• Clear
• Dimensionally structured
• Richly segmented
• Of known pedigree

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 Thinking with our Eyes

70% of body’s sense receptors reside in our eyes.

Vision is the fastest and most nuanced sensor portal.
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the one most intimately connected with cognition
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Why Use a Graphical Representation?

•Humans are actually visual animals. It is estimated that up to 30 percent of the cortex of the brain is devoted to
vision, and we have two big pairs of eyes and we are incredibly good at extracting and processing formation that
comes from our environment.
•Humans are very, very good at processing visual information.
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Facts of creating effective visualization
Fact 1:
Visual perception is selective
Fact 2:
Eyes are drawn to familiar patterns.
We see what we know and expect.
Fact 3:
Memory plays an important role in human
cognition. But working memory is limited.

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Why Use a Graphical Representation?

• Humans perceive things in a variety of ways, such as through

smell, taste, hearing, and vision. Among all the senses, vision is
considered very dominant, as it has a wide “bandwidth” (the bit-
rate of consumed information capacity) for sensing.
• In addition, human vision is pre-attentive.
• Pre-attentive vision is broadly defined as the visual processes
that operate before humans attend to an object. During this stage
of visual search, early visual processes operate in parallel over a
large portion of the visual field, extracting information from each
item’s basic visual features.
• For example, human vision is highly selective when it comes to
different sizes, shapes, colors, spatial positions, and so on, and
that is what makes human vision a powerful tool for data analysis
and interpretation

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 Why Use a Graphical Representation?

Sequential

Parallel

Verbal

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Visualization Types
• Visual representation of information
• Data Visualization
• Information visualization
• Scientific visualization

• Information Visualization: The use of computer

supported, interactive, visual representations of abstract
data to amplify cognition.

• Scientific Visualization: Visual representation of scientific

data that are usually physical in nature (Eg: MRI scan,X-
ray
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Problems with Summary Statistics

Four scatter plots have very different patterns.

But statistics like average of x, y are same for all the scatter plots
Visualization helps to perceive hidden data
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 Data

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The InfoVis pipeline (Diagram of Data Visualization
Process)

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Assessing the Quality of a Visualization

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Reflecting on Data

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Reflecting on Data

Not meaningful to perform any arithmetic

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operations
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 Ordinal and Categorical Data Visualization
• Different visual representations of such data, for
instance Venn‐diagrams, flow‐charts, trees, and so on.
An example of a brilliant representation of network data
is the Map of the London subway from year 1933, which
became a world‐recognized symbol for its simplicity and
clarity
• A new method for representation of mainly categorical
data is the so‐called parallel sets, a technique
developed by a group of researchers from the VRVis
(Virtual Reality and Visualization) Institute of Vienna in
2006.

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Attribute semantics
• Spatial: an attribute describes some spatial
characteristics, often geographical characteristics.
• Temporal : It describes something related to time.

The dataset, having information about Product Category, so the product that has been ordered, what kind of
category of product it falls in. But we also have sub-categories. A sub-category is a Sub-Category of a primary
category.
When you put these two attributes together, you can actually create a hierarchy.
For every category, you have a number of sub-categories. Then the next category,
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a number of sub-categories, and so on. So this structure is Hierarchical.
Attribute semantics

•Diverging means that for a given quantity, it is possible to identify a zero value and above
this value, all the elements are positive, and below this value, all the elements are
negative. In this case, we have a Quantitative attribute that is also Diverging.
•Diverging because we can identify a middle value, and we can identify values that go up and
values that go down
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Data Profiling

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How to Visualize?

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Fundamental Graphs

Points, Lines, Bars, Boxes, Matrix, Maps

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Bar Chart

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Line Chart

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Scatter Plot

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Matrix

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Symbol Map

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 Fundamental Graphs

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 NOMINAL SCALE

• Lines works well for connecting values through time (Eg: month,year)
• Separate Bars accurately encode and visually reinforce the independent nature of these
departments and their expenses.
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The pie chart doesn’t work nearly as well as the bar graph, Because to decode it, we must
compute the 2-D areas or the angles formed by the slices.
But visual perception doesn’t accurately support either of these tasks.
In Bar Graph : Comparing the length of the bars is easy.
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We perceive several basic attributes of visual images pre-attentively i.e
prior to and without the need for conscious awareness – Pre-attentive
attributes
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Pre-attentive reaction

Shaded and unshaded circles Thee clusters

Law of Similarity
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Law of Proximity
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 Length, Width, Size,
Shape, Orientation, Enclosure, Blur,
Curvature

Hue, Intensity

2-D position
Spatial Grouping

Direction
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Pre-Attentive Attributes

Scatter plot shows: No.of Advertisements for the products and the resulting number of products sold.
The best two pre-attentive attributes are : hue and shape
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Scatter plot

Encodes two quantitative values: marketing

Third variable profit is encoded using pre-attentive attribute
expenses and sales revenues for particular
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HEAT MAP

Geographical map such as Weather map, where colors are

used to represent variations in temperature or rainfall
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Heat Map – Tabular Matrix

Variation in gas mileage(Miles per gallon (MPG) ,horsepower and weight for
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Tree Maps

a Treemap is a rectangle-based visualization that allows you to

represent a hierarchically-ordered (tree-structured) set of data
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Graphs for Quantitative Data Analysis

Points

Lines

Bars

Boxes

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 Visual perception does not measures absolute values but instead registers difference between values.

A large rectangle filled with a gradient of gray scale color. Fully white an the left to fully black on the right

Place five small gray rectangle. How different each rectangle looks like.
We perceive color not in absolute but as the difference between the color that
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focusing on and the color that surrounds it.
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Pre-Attentive Attributes
We Perceive differences as ratios rather than as absolute values

The ratio of the length of the two lines on the left is 2 to 1, a difference of 100%.
The ratio of those on the right is 100 to 99 only a 1% difference
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Pre-Attentive Attributes
Pre attentive symbols become less distinct as the variety of distracters increases

Only Gray and Red Five different hues - Distracting

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Overcoming the Limit of Memory
• Long-Term memory (Like computers hard disk)

• Working memory– stores information briefly - (RAM)

• Information enters the working memory

• Through our senses

• From the long term memory

• While we are thinking information is resides in the Working memory.

• Information only stays in the working memory for a few seconds

• Visual working memory can only handle

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Table : Able to hold only three highlighted numbers
Graph: The pattern formed by an entire line could constitute a single chunk
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Information visualization is all about gaining understanding to make good decisions
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 Thank you

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 Bar

Area Dot

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Staked Bar

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Explorative Analysis

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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Confirmation Analysis
Information visualization can also be used to help confirm our understanding and analysis of data. For example, if you perceive a
relationship between two stock prices, you can plot the data and see if the two are related.

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The following is a quotation from Hal Varian, Google's chief economist
(http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Hal_Varian_on_how_the_Web_
challenges_managers_2286):

The ability to take data—to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value
from it, to visualize it, to communicate it—that's going to be a hugely important
skill in the next decades.

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 History
The simplest way to depict and organize quantitative data is a table. However, if the data set has several dimensions, the
table became confused.
Since the 16th century, techniques for precise observation were well developed and then we can see the effort to show
mathematical variables graphically. In the 18th century, new forms of visualization of economics, demography and
health data appear.
Technological innovations (colour, press) open new possibilities of data representation in printed media.
The first half of the 19th century was responsible for an explosion in the growth of statistical graphics. All forms of
statistic charts known today were developed at this time (Friendly, 2005).
One of the famous economic data visualization is Playfair´s chart (Figure 4), where three parallel time ‐series are plotted:
prices, wages, and the reigns of British kings and queens for 250 years, from 1565 to 1821.
Second half of 19th century is known as the golden age of data graphics (Friendly, 2005). Minard´s flow maps, pie chart,
cartogram, polar coordinates chart, three‐dimensional stereogram, and modern weather maps arise all from 19th
century.

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Visualization- BAckground

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 What does the map show us
• Forces visual comparisons (the upper lighter band showing the large
army going to Moscow vs. the narrow dark band showing the small
army returning).
• Shows causality (the temperature chart at the bottom).
• Captures multivariate complexity (size of army, location, direction,
temperature, and time).
• Integrates text and graphic into a coherent whole.
• Illustrate high quality content (complete and accurate data,
presented to support Minard’s argument against war).
• Place comparisons adjacent to each other, not sequentially (people
forget if they have to go from page to page ).
• Use the smallest effective differences (i.e., avoid bold colors, heavy
lines, distracting
“excellence labels
in statistical and
graphics scales).
consists of complex ideas communicated with clarity,
precision, and efficiency”
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Minard’s chart shows six types of information: geography, time, temperature, the course and direction of the army’s
movement, and the number of troops remaining. The widths of the gold (outward) and black (returning) paths
represent the size of the force, one millimetre to 10,000 men. Geographical features and major battles are marked
and named, and plummeting temperatures on the return journey are shown along the bottom.
The chart tells the dreadful story with painful clarity: in 1812, the Grand Army set out from Poland with a force of
422,000; only 100,000 reached Moscow; and only 10,000 returned. The detail and understatement with which such
horrifying loss is represented combine to bring a lump to the throat. As men tried, and mostly failed, to cross the
Bérézina river under heavy attack, the width of the black line halves: another 20,000 or so gone. The French now use
the expression “C’est la Bérézina” to describe a total disaster

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