Perceiving patterns in parallel coordinates: determining thresholds for identification of relationships

This article presents a study that investigates the ability of humans to perceive relationships (patterns) in parallel coordinates, an ability that is crucial to the use of this popular visualization technique. It introduces a visual quality metric, acceptable distortions of patterns, which establishes the level of noise that may be present in data while allowing accurate identification of patterns. This metric was used to assess perceptual performance of standard 2D parallel coordinates and multi-relational 3D parallel coordinates in two experiments. In multi-relational 3D parallel coordinates the axes are placed on a circle with a focus axis in the centre, allowing a simultaneous analysis between the focus variable and all other variables. The experiments aimed to determine the maximum number of variables that can be, from a user's point of view, efficiently used in a multi-relational 3D parallel coordinates display and to present a first attempt to study users' ability to...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: IVS
• Authors: Jimmy Johansson, Camilla Forsell, Mats Lind, Matthew Cooper
• Keywords: Acceptable Distortions, IVS 2008, Parallel Coordinates, Popular Visualization Technique