Smooth Transitions

Abstract

This paper presents new techniques for seamlessly transitioning between parallel coordinate plots, star plots, and scatter plots. The star plot serves as a mediator visualization between parallel coordinate plots and scatter plots because it uses lines to represent data items as parallel coordinates do and can arrange axes orthogonally as used for scatter plots.

The design of the transitions motivated a new variant of the star plot, the polycurve star plot, which uses curved lines instead of straight ones and improves both space utilization and cluster detection. We also developed a geometrically motivated method to embed scatter points from a scatter plot into star plots and parallel coordinate plots, allowing structural information such as clusters and correlations to be tracked during transitions. An interactive multivariate-data analysis tool demonstrates the advantages of the approach, which were confirmed in a user study and concrete usage scenarios.

Publication

D. Kiesel, P. Riehmann, and B. Froehlich. Smooth Transitions Between Parallel Coordinates and Scatter Plots via Polycurve Star Plots Computer Graphics Forum, e14923, August 2023. DOI, Preprint, Video