A Grammar-based Approach for Modeling User Interactions and Generating Suggestions During the Data Exploration Process

Lotse: A Practical Framework for Guidance in Visual Analytics

Co-adaptive guidance aims to enable efficient human-machine collaboration in visual analytics, as proposed by multiple theoretical frameworks. This paper bridges the gap between such conceptual frameworks and practical implementation by introducing an accessible model of guidance and an accompanying guidance library, mapping theory into practice. We contribute a model of system-provided guidance based on design templates and derived strategies. We instantiate the model in a library called Lotse that allows specifying guidance strategies in definition files and generates running code from them. Lotse is the first guidance library using such an approach. It supports the creation of reusable guidance strategies to retrofit existing applications with guidance and fosters the creation of general guidance strategy patterns. We demonstrate its effectiveness through first-use case studies with VA researchers of varying guidance design expertise and find that they are able to effectively and quickly implement guidance with Lotse. Further, we analyze our framework's cognitive dimensions to evaluate its expressiveness and outline a summary of open research questions for aligning guidance practice with its intricate theory.

Diverse Interaction Recommendation for Public Users Exploring Multi-view Visualization using Deep Learning

Interaction is an important channel to offer users insights in interactive visualization systems. However, which interaction to operate and which part of data to explore are hard questions for public users facing a multi-view visualization for the first time. Making these decisions largely relies on professional experience and analytic abilities, which is a huge challenge for non-professionals. To solve the problem, we propose a method aiming to provide diverse, insightful, and real-time interaction recommendations for novice users. Building on the Long-Short Term Memory Model (LSTM) structure, our model captures users' interactions and visual states and encodes them in numerical vectors to make further recommendations. Through an illustrative example of a visualization system about Chinese poets in the museum scenario, the model is proven to be workable in systems with multi-views and multiple interaction types. A further user study demonstrates the method's capability to help public users conduct more insightful and diverse interactive explorations and gain more accurate data insights.

Characterizing the Quality of Insight by Interactions: A Case Study

Understanding the quality of insight has become increasingly important with the trend of allowing users to post comments during visual exploration, yet approaches for qualifying insight are rare. This article presents a case study to investigate the possibility of characterizing the quality of insight via the interactions performed. To do this, we devised the interaction of a visualization tool-MediSyn-for insight generation. MediSyn supports five types of interactions: selecting, connecting, elaborating, exploring, and sharing. We evaluated MediSyn with 14 participants by allowing them to freely explore the data and generate insights. We then extracted seven interaction patterns from their interaction logs and correlated the patterns to four aspects of insight quality. The results show the possibility of qualifying insights via interactions. Among other findings, exploration actions can lead to unexpected insights; the drill-down pattern tends to increase the domain values of insights. A qualitative analysis shows that using domain knowledge to guide exploration can positively affect the domain value of derived insights. We discuss the study's implications, lessons learned, and future research opportunities.

Competing Models: Inferring Exploration Patterns and Information Relevance via Bayesian Model Selection

Analyzing interaction data provides an opportunity to learn about users, uncover their underlying goals, and create intelligent visualization systems. The first step for intelligent response in visualizations is to enable computers to infer user goals and strategies through observing their interactions with a system. Researchers have proposed multiple techniques to model users, however, their frameworks often depend on the visualization design, interaction space, and dataset. Due to these dependencies, many techniques do not provide a general algorithmic solution to user exploration modeling. In this paper, we construct a series of models based on the dataset and pose user exploration modeling as a Bayesian model selection problem where we maintain a belief over numerous competing models that could explain user interactions. Each of these competing models represent an exploration strategy the user could adopt during a session. The goal of our technique is to make high-level and in-depth inferences about the user by observing their low-level interactions. Although our proposed idea is applicable to various probabilistic model spaces, we demonstrate a specific instance of encoding exploration patterns as competing models to infer information relevance. We validate our technique's ability to infer exploration bias, predict future interactions, and summarize an analytic session using user study datasets. Our results indicate that depending on the application, our method outperforms established baselines for bias detection and future interaction prediction. Finally, we discuss future research directions based on our proposed modeling paradigm and suggest how practitioners can use this method to build intelligent visualization systems that understand users' goals and adapt to improve the exploration process.

Enhancing Web-based Analytics Applications through Provenance

Visual analytics systems continue to integrate new technologies and leverage modern environments for exploration and collaboration, making tools and techniques available to a wide audience through web browsers. Many of these systems have been developed with rich interactions, offering users the opportunity to examine details and explore hypotheses that have not been directly encoded by a designer. Understanding is enhanced when users can replay and revisit the steps in the sensemaking process, and in collaborative settings, it is especially important to be able to review not only the current state but also what decisions were made along the way. Unfortunately, many web-based systems lack the ability to capture such reasoning, and the path to a result is transient, forgotten when a user moves to a new view. This paper explores the requirements to augment existing client-side web applications with support for capturing, reviewing, sharing, and reusing steps in the reasoning process. Furthermore, it considers situations where decisions are made with streaming data, and the insights gained from revisiting those choices when more data is available. It presents a proof of concept, the Shareable Interactive Manipulation Provenance framework (SIMProv.js), that addresses these requirements in a modern, client-side JavaScript library, and describes how it can be integrated with existing frameworks.