Increasing the perceptual salience of relationships in parallel coordinate plots
Jonathan M. Harter, Xunlei Wu, Oluwafemi S. Alabi, Madhura Phadke, Lifford Pinto, Daniel P. Dougherty, Hannah Elfner, Steffen A. Bass, Russell M. Taylor · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2011
We present three extensions to parallel coordinates that increase the perceptual salience of relationships between axes in multivariate data sets: (1) luminance modulation maintains the ability to preattentively detect patterns in the presence of overplotting, (2) adding a one-vs.-all variable display highlights relationships between one variable and all others, and (3) adding a scatter plot within the parallel-coordinates display preattentively highlights clusters and spatial layouts without strongly interfering with the parallel-coordinates display. These techniques can be combined with one another and with existing extensions to parallel coordinates, and two of them generalize beyond cases with known-important axes. We applied these techniques to two real-world data sets (relativistic heavy-ion collision hydrodynamics and weather observations with statistical principal component analysis) as well as the popular car data set. We present relationships discovered in the data sets using these methods.