Machine learning (ML) models are nowadays used in complex applications in various domains, such as medicine, bioinformatics, and other sciences. Due to their black box nature, however, it may ...sometimes be hard to understand and trust the results they provide. This has increased the demand for reliable visualization tools related to enhancing trust in ML models, which has become a prominent topic of research in the visualization community over the past decades. To provide an overview and present the frontiers of current research on the topic, we present a State‐of‐the‐Art Report (STAR) on enhancing trust in ML models with the use of interactive visualization. We define and describe the background of the topic, introduce a categorization for visualization techniques that aim to accomplish this goal, and discuss insights and opportunities for future research directions. Among our contributions is a categorization of trust against different facets of interactive ML, expanded and improved from previous research. Our results are investigated from different analytical perspectives: (a) providing a statistical overview, (b) summarizing key findings, (c) performing topic analyses, and (d) exploring the data sets used in the individual papers, all with the support of an interactive web‐based survey browser. We intend this survey to be beneficial for visualization researchers whose interests involve making ML models more trustworthy, as well as researchers and practitioners from other disciplines in their search for effective visualization techniques suitable for solving their tasks with confidence and conveying meaning to their data.
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Over the past years, an increasing number of publications in information visualization, especially within the field of visual analytics, have mentioned the term “embedding” when describing the ...computational approach. Within this context, embeddings are usually (relatively) low‐dimensional, distributed representations of various data types (such as texts or graphs), and since they have proven to be extremely useful for a variety of data analysis tasks across various disciplines and fields, they have become widely used. Existing visualization approaches aim to either support exploration and interpretation of the embedding space through visual representation and interaction, or aim to use embeddings as part of the computational pipeline for addressing downstream analytical tasks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first survey that takes a detailed look at embedding methods through the lens of visual analytics, and the purpose of our survey article is to provide a systematic overview of the state of the art within the emerging field of embedding visualization. We design a categorization scheme for our approach, analyze the current research frontier based on peer‐reviewed publications, and discuss existing trends, challenges, and potential research directions for using embeddings in the context of visual analytics. Furthermore, we provide an interactive survey browser for the collected and categorized survey data, which currently includes 122 entries that appeared between 2007 and 2023.
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During the training phase of machine learning (ML) models, it is usually necessary to configure several hyperparameters. This process is computationally intensive and requires an extensive search to ...infer the best hyperparameter set for the given problem. The challenge is exacerbated by the fact that most ML models are complex internally, and training involves trial‐and‐error processes that could remarkably affect the predictive result. Moreover, each hyperparameter of an ML algorithm is potentially intertwined with the others, and changing it might result in unforeseeable impacts on the remaining hyperparameters. Evolutionary optimization is a promising method to try and address those issues. According to this method, performant models are stored, while the remainder are improved through crossover and mutation processes inspired by genetic algorithms. We present VisEvol, a visual analytics tool that supports interactive exploration of hyperparameters and intervention in this evolutionary procedure. In summary, our proposed tool helps the user to generate new models through evolution and eventually explore powerful hyperparameter combinations in diverse regions of the extensive hyperparameter space. The outcome is a voting ensemble (with equal rights) that boosts the final predictive performance. The utility and applicability of VisEvol are demonstrated with two use cases and interviews with ML experts who evaluated the effectiveness of the tool.
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Despite the tremendous advances in machine learning (ML), training with imbalanced data still poses challenges in many real‐world applications. Among a series of diverse techniques to solve this ...problem, sampling algorithms are regarded as an efficient solution. However, the problem is more fundamental, with many works emphasizing the importance of instance hardness. This issue refers to the significance of managing unsafe or potentially noisy instances that are more likely to be misclassified and serve as the root cause of poor classification performance.
This paper introduces HardVis, a visual analytics system designed to handle instance hardness mainly in imbalanced classification scenarios. Our proposed system assists users in visually comparing different distributions of data types, selecting types of instances based on local characteristics that will later be affected by the active sampling method, and validating which suggestions from undersampling or oversampling techniques are beneficial for the ML model. Additionally, rather than uniformly undersampling/oversampling a specific class, we allow users to find and sample easy and difficult to classify training instances from all classes. Users can explore subsets of data from different perspectives to decide all those parameters, while HardVis keeps track of their steps and evaluates the model's predictive performance in a test set separately. The end result is a well‐balanced data set that boosts the predictive power of the ML model. The efficacy and effectiveness of HardVis are demonstrated with a hypothetical usage scenario and a use case. Finally, we also look at how useful our system is based on feedback we received from ML experts.
We present HardVis, a visual analytics system designed to handle instance hardness mainly in imbalanced classification scenarios. Our proposed system assists users in visually comparing different distributions of data types, selecting types of instances based on local characteristics that will later be affected by the active sampling method, and validating which suggestions from undersampling or oversampling techniques are beneficial for the ML model.
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5.
Graph Layouts by t‐SNE Kruiger, J. F.; Rauber, P. E.; Martins, R. M. ...
Computer graphics forum,
June 2017, Volume:
36, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
We propose a new graph layout method based on a modification of the t‐distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t‐SNE) dimensionality reduction technique. Although t‐SNE is one of the best ...techniques for visualizing high‐dimensional data as 2D scatterplots, t‐SNE has not been used in the context of classical graph layout. We propose a new graph layout method, tsNET, based on representing a graph with a distance matrix, which together with a modified t‐SNE cost function results in desirable layouts. We evaluate our method by a formal comparison with state‐of‐the‐art methods, both visually and via established quality metrics on a comprehensive benchmark, containing real‐world and synthetic graphs. As evidenced by the quality metrics and visual inspection, tsNET produces excellent layouts.
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Interaction between particles in so-called granular media, such as soil and sand, plays an important role in the context of geomechanical phenomena and numerous industrial applications. A two scale ...homogenization approach based on a micro and a macro scale level is briefly introduced in this paper. Computation of granular material in such a way gives a deeper insight into the context of discontinuous materials and at the same time reduces the computational costs. However, the description and the understanding of the phenomena in granular materials are not yet satisfactory. A sophisticated problem-specific visualization technique would significantly help to illustrate failure phenomena on the microscopic level. As main contribution, we present a novel 2D approach for the visualization of simulation data, based on the above outlined homogenization technique. Our visualization tool supports visualization on micro scale level as well as on macro scale level. The tool shows both aspects closely arranged in form of multiple coordinated views to give users the possibility to analyze the particle behavior effectively. A novel type of interactive rose diagrams was developed to represent the dynamic contact networks on the micro scale level in a condensed and efficient way.
With the advancing digitisation of society and industry we observe a progressing blending of computational, physical, and social processes. The trustworthiness and sustainability of these systems ...will be vital for our society. However, engineering modern computing systems is complex as they have to: i) operate in uncertain and continuously changing environments, ii) deal with huge amounts of data, and iii) require seamless interaction with human operators. To that end, we argue that both systems and the way we engineer them must become smarter. With smarter we mean that systems and engineering processes adapt and evolve themselves through a perpetual process that continuously improves their capabilities and utility to deal with the uncertainties and amounts of data they face. We highlight key engineering areas: cyber-physical systems, self-adaptation, data-driven technologies, and visual analytics, and outline key challenges in each of them. From this, we propose a research agenda for the years to come.
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This paper firstly provides a general introduction in the most important aspects and ideas of Visual Analytics. This multidisciplinary field focuses on the analytical reasoning of typically large and ...complex (often heterogeneous) data sets and combines techniques from interactive visualizations with computational analysis methods. Hereby, intuitive and efficient user interactions are a fundamental component which has to be efficiently supported by any Visual Analytics system. This integration of interaction techniques into both visual representations and automatic analysis methods supports the human-information discourse and can be realized in various ways which is discussed in the second part of the paper. We give examples of possible applications of Visual Analytics from the domain of biological simulations and highlight the importance and role of the human in the analysis loop.
Information Visualization Hutchison, David; Kanade, Takeo; Kittler, Josef ...
2008, 2009-01-22, Volume:
4950
eBook, Book
Information Visualization (InfoVis) is a relatively new research area, which focuses on the use of visualization techniques to help people understand and analyze data. This book documents and extends ...the findings and discussions of the various sessions in detail.
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