The Subspace Voyager: Exploring High-Dimensional Data along a Continuum of Salient 3D Subspaces

Analyzing high-dimensional data and finding hidden patterns is a difficult problem and has attracted numerous research efforts. Automated methods can be useful to some extent but bringing the data analyst into the loop via interactive visual tools can help the discovery process tremendously. An inherent problem in this effort is that humans lack the mental capacity to truly understand spaces exceeding three spatial dimensions. To keep within this limitation, we describe a framework that decomposes a high-dimensional data space into a continuum of generalized 3D subspaces. Analysts can then explore these 3D subspaces individually via the familiar trackball interface while using additional facilities to smoothly transition to adjacent subspaces for expanded space comprehension. Since the number of such subspaces suffers from combinatorial explosion, we provide a set of data-driven subspace selection and navigation tools which can guide users to interesting subspaces and views. A subspace trail map allows users to manage the explored subspaces, keep their bearings, and return to interesting subspaces and views. Both trackball and trail map are each embedded into a word cloud of attribute labels which aid in navigation. We demonstrate our system via several use cases in a diverse set of application areas - cluster analysis and refinement, information discovery, and supervised training of classifiers. We also report on a user study that evaluates the usability of the various interactions our system provides.