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VizAssist: an interactive user assistant for visual data mining

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Abstract

We study in this work how a user can be guided to find a relevant visualization in the context of visual data mining. We present a state of the art on the user assistance in visual and interactive methods. We propose a user assistant called VizAssist, which aims at improving the existing approaches along three directions: it uses simpler computational models of the visualizations and the visual perception guidelines, in order to facilitate the integration of new visualizations and the definition of a mapping heuristic. VizAssist allows the user to provide feedback in a visual and interactive way, with the aim of improving the data to visualization mapping. This step is performed with an interactive genetic algorithm. Finally, VizAssist aims at proposing a free on-line tool (www.vizassist.fr) that respects the privacy of the user data. This assistant can be viewed as a global interface between the user and some of the many visualizations that are implemented with D3js.

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Notes

  1. See kdnuggets.com and the poll on “Algorithms for data analysis/data mining”.

  2. See http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/1341021.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Jean Debarochez, Remy Pradignac and Yann-Thomas Le Moigne, the students in our school of Computer Science, for their contribution to the development of the on-line version of VizAssist. We are also grateful to the community of D3js developers for sharing their work and visualization codes. VizAssist was partially funded by the FDTE research project of the Région Centre, France.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Lille2, IUT, 25-27 Rue du Maréchal Foch, 59100, Roubaix, France

    Fatma Bouali

  2. Computer Science Laboratory, University François-Rabelais of Tours, 64 avenue Jean Portalis, 37200, Tours, France

    Fatma Bouali, Abdelheq Guettala & Gilles Venturini

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  1. Fatma Bouali
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  2. Abdelheq Guettala
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  3. Gilles Venturini
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Correspondence to Gilles Venturini.

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Bouali, F., Guettala, A. & Venturini, G. VizAssist: an interactive user assistant for visual data mining. Vis Comput 32, 1447–1463 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-015-1132-9

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