CandidTree: Visualizing Structural Uncertainty in Similar Hierarchies

Most visualization systems fail to convey uncertainty within data. To provide a way to show uncertainty in similar hierarchies, we interpreted the differences between two tree structures as uncertainty. We developed a new interactive visualization system called CandidTree that merges two trees into one and visualizes two types of structural uncertainty: location and sub-tree structure uncertainty. We conducted a usability study to identify major usability issues and evaluate how our system works. Another qualitative user study was conducted to see if biologists, who regularly work with hierarchically organized names, are able to use CandidTree to complete tree-comparison tasks. We also assessed the “uncertainty” metric we used.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: INTERACT
• Authors: Bongshin Lee, George G. Robertson, Mary Czerwinski, Cynthia Sims Parr
• Keywords: Human Computer Interaction, INTERACT 2007, Most Visualization Systems, Structural Uncertainty, Sub-tree Structure Uncertainty