56 Chapter 2 Getting to Know Your Data

Figure 2.9 Three cases where there is no observed correlation between the two plotted attributes in each
of the data sets.

from lower left to upper right, this means that the values of X increase as the values
of Y increase, suggesting a positive correlation (Figure 2.8a). If the pattern of plotted
points slopes from upper left to lower right, the values of X increase as the values of Y
decrease, suggesting a negative correlation (Figure 2.8b). A line of best fit can be drawn
to study the correlation between the variables. Statistical tests for correlation are given
in Chapter 3 on data integration (Eq. (3.3)). Figure 2.9 shows three cases for which
there is no correlation relationship between the two attributes in each of the given data
sets. Section 2.3.2 shows how scatter plots can be extended to n attributes, resulting in a
scatter-plot matrix.

In conclusion, basic data descriptions (e.g., measures of central tendency and mea-
sures of dispersion) and graphic statistical displays (e.g., quantile plots, histograms, and
scatter plots) provide valuable insight into the overall behavior of your data. By helping
to identify noise and outliers, they are especially useful for data cleaning.

2.3 Data Visualization

How can we convey data to users effectively? Data visualization aims to communicate
data clearly and effectively through graphical representation. Data visualization has been
used extensively in many applications—for example, at work for reporting, managing
business operations, and tracking progress of tasks. More popularly, we can take advan-
tage of visualization techniques to discover data relationships that are otherwise not
easily observable by looking at the raw data. Nowadays, people also use data visualization
to create fun and interesting graphics.
In this section, we briefly introduce the basic concepts of data visualization. We start
with multidimensional data such as those stored in relational databases. We discuss
several representative approaches, including pixel-oriented techniques, geometric pro-
jection techniques, icon-based techniques, and hierarchical and graph-based techniques.
We then discuss the visualization of complex data and relations.
 2.3 Data Visualization 57

2.3.1 Pixel-Oriented Visualization Techniques

A simple way to visualize the value of a dimension is to use a pixel where the color of
the pixel reflects the dimension’s value. For a data set of m dimensions, pixel-oriented
techniques create m windows on the screen, one for each dimension. The m dimension
values of a record are mapped to m pixels at the corresponding positions in the windows.
The colors of the pixels reflect the corresponding values.
Inside a window, the data values are arranged in some global order shared by all
windows. The global order may be obtained by sorting all data records in a way that’s
meaningful for the task at hand.

Example 2.16 Pixel-oriented visualization. AllElectronics maintains a customer information table,

which consists of four dimensions: income, credit limit, transaction volume, and age. Can
we analyze the correlation between income and the other attributes by visualization?
We can sort all customers in income-ascending order, and use this order to lay out
the customer data in the four visualization windows, as shown in Figure 2.10. The pixel
colors are chosen so that the smaller the value, the lighter the shading. Using pixel-
based visualization, we can easily observe the following: credit limit increases as income
increases; customers whose income is in the middle range are more likely to purchase
more from AllElectronics; there is no clear correlation between income and age.

In pixel-oriented techniques, data records can also be ordered in a query-dependent

way. For example, given a point query, we can sort all records in descending order of
similarity to the point query.
Filling a window by laying out the data records in a linear way may not work well for
a wide window. The first pixel in a row is far away from the last pixel in the previous row,
though they are next to each other in the global order. Moreover, a pixel is next to the
one above it in the window, even though the two are not next to each other in the global
order. To solve this problem, we can lay out the data records in a space-filling curve

(a) income (b) credit_limit (c) transaction_volume (d) age

Figure 2.10 Pixel-oriented visualization of four attributes by sorting all customers in income ascending
order.
58 Chapter 2 Getting to Know Your Data

(a) Hilbert curve (b) Gray code (c) Z-curve

Figure 2.11 Some frequently used 2-D space-filling curves.

One data
record Dim 6
Dim 6

Dim 5 Dim 1
Dim 5 Dim 1

Dim 4 Dim 2
Dim 4 Dim 2

Dim 3
Dim 3
(b)
(a)

Figure 2.12 The circle segment technique. (a) Representing a data record in circle segments. (b) Laying
out pixels in circle segments.

to fill the windows. A space-filling curve is a curve with a range that covers the entire
n-dimensional unit hypercube. Since the visualization windows are 2-D, we can use any
2-D space-filling curve. Figure 2.11 shows some frequently used 2-D space-filling curves.
Note that the windows do not have to be rectangular. For example, the circle segment
technique uses windows in the shape of segments of a circle, as illustrated in Figure 2.12.
This technique can ease the comparison of dimensions because the dimension windows
are located side by side and form a circle.

2.3.2 Geometric Projection Visualization Techniques

A drawback of pixel-oriented visualization techniques is that they cannot help us much
in understanding the distribution of data in a multidimensional space. For example, they
do not show whether there is a dense area in a multidimensional subspace. Geometric
 2.3 Data Visualization 59

80

70

60

50

40
Y

30

20

10

0
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80
X

Figure 2.13 Visualization of a 2-D data set using a scatter plot. Source: www.cs.sfu.ca/jpei/publications/
rareevent-geoinformatica06.pdf .

projection techniques help users find interesting projections of multidimensional data

sets. The central challenge the geometric projection techniques try to address is how to
visualize a high-dimensional space on a 2-D display.
A scatter plot displays 2-D data points using Cartesian coordinates. A third dimen-
sion can be added using different colors or shapes to represent different data points.
Figure 2.13 shows an example, where X and Y are two spatial attributes and the third
dimension is represented by different shapes. Through this visualization, we can see that
points of types “+” and “×” tend to be colocated.
A 3-D scatter plot uses three axes in a Cartesian coordinate system. If it also uses
color, it can display up to 4-D data points (Figure 2.14).
For data sets with more than four dimensions, scatter plots are usually ineffective.
The scatter-plot matrix technique is a useful extension to the scatter plot. For an n-
dimensional data set, a scatter-plot matrix is an n × n grid of 2-D scatter plots that
provides a visualization of each dimension with every other dimension. Figure 2.15
shows an example, which visualizes the Iris data set. The data set consists of 450 sam-
ples from each of three species of Iris flowers. There are five dimensions in the data set:
length and width of sepal and petal, and species.
The scatter-plot matrix becomes less effective as the dimensionality increases.
Another popular technique, called parallel coordinates, can handle higher dimensional-
ity. To visualize n-dimensional data points, the parallel coordinates technique draws
n equally spaced axes, one for each dimension, parallel to one of the display axes.
60 Chapter 2 Getting to Know Your Data

Figure 2.14 Visualization of a 3-D data set using a scatter plot. Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/
wikipedia/commons/c/c4/Scatter plot.jpg.

A data record is represented by a polygonal line that intersects each axis at the point
corresponding to the associated dimension value (Figure 2.16).
A major limitation of the parallel coordinates technique is that it cannot effec-
tively show a data set of many records. Even for a data set of several thousand records,
visual clutter and overlap often reduce the readability of the visualization and make the
patterns hard to find.

2.3.3 Icon-Based Visualization Techniques

Icon-based visualization techniques use small icons to represent multidimensional
data values. We look at two popular icon-based techniques: Chernoff faces and stick
figures.
Chernoff faces were introduced in 1973 by statistician Herman Chernoff. They dis-
play multidimensional data of up to 18 variables (or dimensions) as a cartoon human
face (Figure 2.17). Chernoff faces help reveal trends in the data. Components of the
face, such as the eyes, ears, mouth, and nose, represent values of the dimensions by their
shape, size, placement, and orientation. For example, dimensions can be mapped to the
following facial characteristics: eye size, eye spacing, nose length, nose width, mouth
curvature, mouth width, mouth openness, pupil size, eyebrow slant, eye eccentricity,
and head eccentricity.
Chernoff faces make use of the ability of the human mind to recognize small dif-
ferences in facial characteristics and to assimilate many facial characteristics at once.
 2.3 Data Visualization 61

10 30 50 70 0 10 20

80
70
Sepal length (mm) 60
50
40
70

50
Petal length (mm)
30

10
45
40
35
Sepal width (mm)
30
25
20
25
20
15 Petal width (mm)
10
5
0
40 50 60 70 80 20 30 40
Iris Species Setosa Versicolor Virginica

Figure 2.15 Visualization of the Iris data set using a scatter-plot matrix. Source: http://support.sas.com/
documentation/cdl/en/grstatproc/61948/HTML/default/images/gsgscmat.gif .

Viewing large tables of data can be tedious. By condensing the data, Chernoff faces
make the data easier for users to digest. In this way, they facilitate visualization of reg-
ularities and irregularities present in the data, although their power in relating multiple
relationships is limited. Another limitation is that specific data values are not shown.
Furthermore, facial features vary in perceived importance. This means that the similarity
of two faces (representing two multidimensional data points) can vary depending on the
order in which dimensions are assigned to facial characteristics. Therefore, this mapping
should be carefully chosen. Eye size and eyebrow slant have been found to be important.
Asymmetrical Chernoff faces were proposed as an extension to the original technique.
Since a face has vertical symmetry (along the y-axis), the left and right side of a face are
identical, which wastes space. Asymmetrical Chernoff faces double the number of facial
characteristics, thus allowing up to 36 dimensions to be displayed.
The stick figure visualization technique maps multidimensional data to five-piece
stick figures, where each figure has four limbs and a body. Two dimensions are mapped
to the display (x and y) axes and the remaining dimensions are mapped to the angle
62 Chapter 2 Getting to Know Your Data

y
10

0 x

–5

–10
⫻1 ⫻2 ⫻3 ⫻4 ⫻5 ⫻6 ⫻7 ⫻8 ⫻9 ⫻10

Figure 2.16 Here is a visualization that uses parallel coordinates. Source: www.stat.columbia.edu/∼cook/
movabletype/archives/2007/10/parallel coordi.thml.

Figure 2.17 Chernoff faces. Each face represents an n-dimensional data point (n ≤ 18).

and/or length of the limbs. Figure 2.18 shows census data, where age and income are
mapped to the display axes, and the remaining dimensions (gender, education, and so
on) are mapped to stick figures. If the data items are relatively dense with respect to
the two display dimensions, the resulting visualization shows texture patterns, reflecting
data trends.
 2.3 Data Visualization 63

age

income

Figure 2.18 Census data represented using stick figures. Source: Professor G. Grinstein, Department of
Computer Science, University of Massachusetts at Lowell.

2.3.4 Hierarchical Visualization Techniques

The visualization techniques discussed so far focus on visualizing multiple dimensions
simultaneously. However, for a large data set of high dimensionality, it would be diffi-
cult to visualize all dimensions at the same time. Hierarchical visualization techniques
partition all dimensions into subsets (i.e., subspaces). The subspaces are visualized in a
hierarchical manner.
“Worlds-within-Worlds,” also known as n-Vision, is a representative hierarchical
visualization method. Suppose we want to visualize a 6-D data set, where the dimensions
are F, X1 , . . . , X5 . We want to observe how dimension F changes with respect to the other
dimensions. We can first fix the values of dimensions X3 , X4 , X5 to some selected values,
say, c3 , c4 , c5 . We can then visualize F, X1 , X2 using a 3-D plot, called a world, as shown in
Figure 2.19. The position of the origin of the inner world is located at the point (c3 , c4 , c5 )
in the outer world, which is another 3-D plot using dimensions X3 , X4 , X5 . A user can
interactively change, in the outer world, the location of the origin of the inner world.
The user then views the resulting changes of the inner world. Moreover, a user can vary
the dimensions used in the inner world and the outer world. Given more dimensions,
more levels of worlds can be used, which is why the method is called “worlds-within-
worlds.”
As another example of hierarchical visualization methods, tree-maps display hier-
archical data as a set of nested rectangles. For example, Figure 2.20 shows a tree-map
visualizing Google news stories. All news stories are organized into seven categories, each
shown in a large rectangle of a unique color. Within each category (i.e., each rectangle
at the top level), the news stories are further partitioned into smaller subcategories.
64 Chapter 2 Getting to Know Your Data

Figure 2.19 “Worlds-within-Worlds” (also known as n-Vision). Source: http://graphics.cs.columbia.edu/

projects/AutoVisual/images/1.dipstick.5.gif.

2.3.5 Visualizing Complex Data and Relations

In early days, visualization techniques were mainly for numeric data. Recently, more
and more non-numeric data, such as text and social networks, have become available.
Visualizing and analyzing such data attracts a lot of interest.
There are many new visualization techniques dedicated to these kinds of data. For
example, many people on the Web tag various objects such as pictures, blog entries, and
product reviews. A tag cloud is a visualization of statistics of user-generated tags. Often,
in a tag cloud, tags are listed alphabetically or in a user-preferred order. The importance
of a tag is indicated by font size or color. Figure 2.21 shows a tag cloud for visualizing
the popular tags used in a Web site.
Tag clouds are often used in two ways. First, in a tag cloud for a single item, we can
use the size of a tag to represent the number of times that the tag is applied to this item
by different users. Second, when visualizing the tag statistics on multiple items, we can
use the size of a tag to represent the number of items that the tag has been applied to,
that is, the popularity of the tag.
In addition to complex data, complex relations among data entries also raise chal-
lenges for visualization. For example, Figure 2.22 uses a disease influence graph to
visualize the correlations between diseases. The nodes in the graph are diseases, and
the size of each node is proportional to the prevalence of the corresponding disease.
Two nodes are linked by an edge if the corresponding diseases have a strong correlation.
The width of an edge is proportional to the strength of the correlation pattern of the two
corresponding diseases.
 2.4 Measuring Data Similarity and Dissimilarity 65

Figure 2.20 Newsmap: Use of tree-maps to visualize Google news headline stories. Source: www.cs.umd.
edu/class/spring2005/cmsc838s/viz4all/ss/newsmap.png.

In summary, visualization provides effective tools to explore data. We have intro-

duced several popular methods and the essential ideas behind them. There are many
existing tools and methods. Moreover, visualization can be used in data mining in vari-
ous aspects. In addition to visualizing data, visualization can be used to represent the
data mining process, the patterns obtained from a mining method, and user interaction
with the data. Visual data mining is an important research and development direction.

2.4 Measuring Data Similarity and Dissimilarity

In data mining applications, such as clustering, outlier analysis, and nearest-neighbor

classification, we need ways to assess how alike or unalike objects are in comparison to
one another. For example, a store may want to search for clusters of customer objects,
resulting in groups of customers with similar characteristics (e.g., similar income, area
of residence, and age). Such information can then be used for marketing. A cluster is