Radial Sets: Interactive Visual Analysis of Large Overlapping Sets

Abstract

In many applications, data tables contain multi-valued attributes that often store the memberships of the table entities to multiple sets such as which languages a person masters, which skills an applicant documents, or which features a product comes with. With a growing number of entities, the resulting element-set membership matrix becomes very rich of information about how these sets overlap. Many analysis tasks targeted at set-typed data are concerned with these overlaps as salient features of such data. This paper presents Radial Sets, a novel visual technique to analyze set memberships for a large number of elements. Our technique uses frequency-based representations to enable quickly finding and analyzing different kinds of overlaps between the sets, and relating these overlaps to other attributes of the table entities. Furthermore, it enables various interactions to select elements of interest, find out if they are over-represented in specific sets or overlaps, and if they exhibit a different distribution for a specific attribute compared to the rest of the elements. These interactions allow formulating highly-expressive visual queries on the elements in terms of their set memberships and attribute values. As we demonstrate via two usage scenarios, Radial Sets enable revealing and analyzing a multitude of overlapping patterns between large sets, beyond the limits of state-of-the-art techniques.

User-controllable personalization: A case study with SetFusion

“…We believe that the complex visualization, induced cognitive overload, was one of the issues and we wanted to minimize its effect with a common Venn format. On the other hand, we still explored some options to further scale the visualization to a larger number of sets by adding interactive clustering (Fink et al, 2012) or implementing a radial layout visualization like RadialSets (Alsallakh et al, 2013) …”

“…Alternative options to display intersections of sets such as interactive clustering (Fink, Haunert, Schulz, Spoerhase, & Wolff, 2012) or radial sets (Alsallakh, Aigner, Miksch, & Hauser, 2013) provide motivation for future implementation.…”

A Simple Approach for Boundary Improvement of Euler Diagrams

“…As the algorithm we propose in this work improves diagrams that represent sets as polygons, we focus on these methods for set visualization in this section. However, it is important to note that other approaches exist for visualizing sets and their intersections that are based on circles [13,26,33], ellipses [16], and approaches that are not based on closed curves at all [1,2,15,23].…”

OnSet: A Visualization Technique for Large-scale Binary Set Data

“…As the mouse hovers over an element group, the same group is highlighted in the other blocks where they are found. The Radial Sets visualization [2] seeks to address issues of scale that arise with several of the techniques discussed so far. They extend several ideas, such as frequency aggregation from the Set'o'grams, to produce a tool that can analyse sets with large numbers of elements.…”

“…Increasing quantities, both of elements and sets, remains a challenge though, and these techniques quickly become complex and difficult to visually interpret and understand as the sets contain larger numbers of elements. More recent techniques explicitly address scalability [2] but they sometimes come at the cost of showing individual elements and the views become more difficult to interpret.…”