Interactive Visual Data Analysis

Book excerpt: In the age of big data, being able to make sense of data is an important key to success. Interactive Visual Data Analysis advocates the synthesis of visualization, interaction, and automatic computation to facilitate insight generation and knowledge crystallization from large and complex data. The book provides a systematic and comprehensive overview of visual, interactive, and analytical methods. It introduces criteria for designing interactive visual data analysis solutions, discusses factors influencing the design, and examines the involved processes. The reader is made familiar with the basics of visual encoding and gets to know numerous visualization techniques for multivariate data, temporal data, geo-spatial data, and graph data. A dedicated chapter introduces general concepts for interacting with visualizations and illustrates how modern interaction technology can facilitate the visual data analysis in many ways. Addressing today’s large and complex data, the book covers relevant automatic analytical computations to support the visual data analysis. The book also sheds light on advanced concepts for visualization in multi-display environments, user guidance during the data analysis, and progressive visual data analysis. The authors present a top-down perspective on interactive visual data analysis with a focus on concise and clean terminology. Many real-world examples and rich illustrations make the book accessible to a broad interdisciplinary audience from students, to experts in the field, to practitioners in data-intensive application domains. Features: Dedicated to the synthesis of visual, interactive, and analysis methods Systematic top-down view on visualization, interaction, and automatic analysis Broad coverage of fundamental and advanced visualization techniques Comprehensive chapter on interacting with visual representations Extensive integration of automatic computational methods Accessible portrayal of cutting-edge visual analytics technology Foreword by Jack van Wijk For more information, you can also visit the author website, where the book's figures are made available under the CC BY Open Access license.