Variable binned scatter plots

The scatter plot is a well-known method of visualizing pairs of two-dimensional continuous variables. Multidimensional data can be depicted in a scatter plot matrix. They are intuitive and easy-to-use, but often have a high degree of overlap which may occlude a significant portion of data. In this paper, we propose variable binned scatter plots to allow the visualization of large amounts of data without overlapping. The basic idea is to use a non-uniform (variable) binning of the x and y dimensions and plots all the data points that fall within each bin into corresponding squares. Further, we map a third attribute to color for visualizing data distribution and clustering. Analysts are able to interact with individual data points for record level information. We have applied these techniques to solve real-world problems on credit card fraud and data center energy consumption to visualize their data distribution and cause-effect among multiple attributes. A comparison of our methods wit...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: IVS
• Authors: Ming C. Hao, Umeshwar Dayal, Ratnesh K. Sharma, Daniel A. Keim, Halldor Janetzko
• Keywords: Data Distribution, IVS 2010, Scatter Plot Matrix, Scatter Plots