Norrköping 2008Efficient Information Visualization of Multivariate and Time-Varying Data

Data can be found everywhere, for example in the form of price, size, weight and colour of all products sold by a company, or as time series of daily observations of temperature, precipitation, wind and visibility from thousands of stations. Due to their size and complexity it is intrinsically hard to form a global overview and understanding of them. Information visualization aims at overcoming these difficulties by transforming data into representations that can be more easily interpreted. This thesis presents work on the development of methods to enable efficient information visualization of multivariate and time-varying data sets by conveying information in a clear and interpretable way, and in a reasonable time. The work presented is primarily based on a popular multivariate visualization technique called parallel coordinates but many of the methods can be generalized to apply to other information visualization techniques. A three-dimensional, multi-relational version of parallel coordinates is presented that enables a simultaneous analysis of all pairwise relationships between a single focus variable and all other variables included in the display. This approach permits a more rapid analysis of highly multivariate data sets. Through a number of user studies, the multi-relational parallel coordinate