The Promise and Challenge of Multidimensional Visualization

Abstract

${\cal A}$ dataset with M items has 2^M subsets anyone of which may be the one we really want. With a good data display our fantastic pattern-recognition ability can not only cut great swaths searching through this combinatorial explosion but also extract insights from the visual patterns. These are the core reasons for data visualization. With Parallel Coordinates (abbr. ||-coords) the search for multivariate relations in high dimensional datasets is transformed into a 2-D pattern recognition problem. After a short overview of ||-coords, guidelines and strategies for knowledge discovery are illustrated on different real datasets, one with 400 variables from a manufacturing process.