Similarity brushing for exploring multidimensional relations

Abstract

Displaying multidimensional information has always been a challenge. Projecting multiple dimensions into a two dimensional display is one of the core tasks of information visualization. The human visual system is limited to a low number of dimensions and therefore the human-oriented projection does not easily combine the whole information contained in the original space. This paper introduces a new interaction tool, that implants the n-dimensional information into a low dimensional view and bridges the projection space with the original space in an intuitive and simple way. In one direction the tool performs ndimensional data-driven brushing based on screen space interaction. In the opposite direction it allows for interactive visual exploration of the original multidimensional space in an infovis display. The implementation is presented using a standard scatterplot but it can be extended to many other infovis techniques as the concept does not depend on the screen space configuration.