SightBi: Exploring Cross-View Data Relationships with Biclusters

TL;DR

SightBi is a visual analytics tool that formalizes and visualizes cross-view data relationships as biclusters, reducing user effort in exploring complex multi-view datasets across domains like bioinformatics and cybersecurity.

Contribution

SightBi introduces a bicluster-based formalization and visualization approach for cross-view data relationships, enhancing exploration efficiency and preserving existing views.

Findings

Effective visualization of cross-view relationships as biclusters.

Reduces trial-and-error in multi-view data exploration.

Supports interactive management of multiple views.

Abstract

Multiple-view visualization (MV) has been heavily used in visual analysis tools for sensemaking of data in various domains (e.g., bioinformatics, cybersecurity and text analytics). One common task of visual analysis with multiple views is to relate data across different views. For example, to identify threats, an intelligence analyst needs to link people from a social network graph with locations on a crime-map, and then search for and read relevant documents. Currently, exploring cross-view data relationships heavily relies on view-coordination techniques (e.g., brushing and linking), which may require significant user effort on many trial-and-error attempts, such as repetitiously selecting elements in one view, and then observing and following elements highlighted in other views. To address this, we present SightBi, a visual analytics approach for supporting cross-view data relationship explorations. We discuss the design rationale of SightBi in detail, with identified user tasks regarding the use of cross-view data relationships. SightBi formalizes cross-view data relationships as biclusters, computes them from a dataset, and uses a bi-context design that highlights creating stand-alone relationship-views. This helps preserve existing views and offers an overview of cross-view data relationships to guide user exploration. Moreover, SightBi allows users to interactively manage the layout of multiple views by using newly created relationship-views. With a usage scenario, we demonstrate the usefulness of SightBi for sensemaking of cross-view data relationships.