DataVizard: Recommending Visual Presentations for Structured Data

TL;DR

DataVizard is an automated system that recommends suitable visualizations for structured data, reducing manual effort and improving accuracy in selecting visual representations for query results and web tables.

Contribution

The paper introduces DataVizard, a novel system that automatically suggests appropriate visualizations for structured data, streamlining the visualization selection process.

Findings

High accuracy in visualization recommendations on real-world data.

Effective in both SQL query results and web table scenarios.

Positive user feedback on visualization relevance.

Abstract

Selecting the appropriate visual presentation of the data such that it preserves the semantics of the underlying data and at the same time provides an intuitive summary of the data is an important, often the final step of data analytics. Unfortunately, this is also a step involving significant human effort starting from selection of groups of columns in the structured results from analytics stages, to the selection of right visualization by experimenting with various alternatives. In this paper, we describe our \emph{DataVizard} system aimed at reducing this overhead by automatically recommending the most appropriate visual presentation for the structured result. Specifically, we consider the following two scenarios: first, when one needs to visualize the results of a structured query such as SQL; and the second, when one has acquired a data table with an associated short description (e.g., tables from the Web). Using a corpus of real-world database queries (and their results) and a number of statistical tables crawled from the Web, we show that DataVizard is capable of recommending visual presentations with high accuracy. We also present the results of a user survey that we conducted in order to assess user views of the suitability of the presented charts vis-a-vis the plain text captions of the data.