ASTA: Learning Analytical Semantics over Tables for Intelligent Data Analysis and Visualization

TL;DR

This paper introduces ASTA, a framework that learns analytical semantics over tables to provide explainable and accurate recommendations for data analysis and visualization, including chart and conditional formatting suggestions.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach to automate and explain table analysis by separating data focus from user intent, applying analytical semantics, and leveraging pre-trained models for recommendations.

Findings

Achieved 62.86% recall@1 on public chart data, outperforming baselines by 14%.

Attained 72.31% recall@1 on ConFormT corpus, demonstrating effectiveness.

Validated the framework's ability to deliver accurate, explainable data analysis suggestions.

Abstract

Intelligent analysis and visualization of tables use techniques to automatically recommend useful knowledge from data, thus freeing users from tedious multi-dimension data mining. While many studies have succeeded in automating recommendations through rules or machine learning, it is difficult to generalize expert knowledge and provide explainable recommendations. In this paper, we present the recommendation of conditional formatting for the first time, together with chart recommendation, to exemplify intelligent table analysis. We propose analytical semantics over tables to uncover common analysis pattern behind user-created analyses. Here, we design analytical semantics by separating data focus from user intent, which extract the user motivation from data and human perspective respectively. Furthermore, the ASTA framework is designed by us to apply analytical semantics to multiple automated recommendations. ASTA framework extracts data features by designing signatures based on expert knowledge, and enables data referencing at field- (chart) or cell-level (conditional formatting) with pre-trained models. Experiments show that our framework achieves recall at top 1 of 62.86% on public chart corpora, outperforming the best baseline about 14%, and achieves 72.31% on the collected corpus ConFormT, validating that ASTA framework is effective in providing accurate and explainable recommendations.