AI4VIS: Survey on Artificial Intelligence Approaches for Data Visualization

TL;DR

This survey explores how artificial intelligence techniques are increasingly applied to visualization data, formalizing visualizations as a new data format and reviewing recent advances across multiple computer science fields.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive taxonomy of AI applications to visualization data, highlighting common tasks, approaches, and open research questions in this emerging area.

Findings

AI techniques are being used to automate visualization analysis and generation.

Visualization data is recognized as a formal data format for AI processing.

The survey identifies key challenges and future directions in AI for visualization data.

Abstract

Visualizations themselves have become a data format. Akin to other data formats such as text and images, visualizations are increasingly created, stored, shared, and (re-)used with artificial intelligence (AI) techniques. In this survey, we probe the underlying vision of formalizing visualizations as an emerging data format and review the recent advance in applying AI techniques to visualization data (AI4VIS). We define visualization data as the digital representations of visualizations in computers and focus on data visualization (e.g., charts and infographics). We build our survey upon a corpus spanning ten different fields in computer science with an eye toward identifying important common interests. Our resulting taxonomy is organized around WHAT is visualization data and its representation, WHY and HOW to apply AI to visualization data. We highlight a set of common tasks that researchers apply to the visualization data and present a detailed discussion of AI approaches developed to accomplish those tasks. Drawing upon our literature review, we discuss several important research questions surrounding the management and exploitation of visualization data, as well as the role of AI in support of those processes. We make the list of surveyed papers and related material available online at ai4vis.github.io.