Parallel coordinates and scatter plots

This page exists to discuss the design and implementation of parallel coordinate and scatter plot views in ParaView.

Literature Survey

• Artero, de Oliveira, Levkowitz. "Uncovering Clusters in Crowded Parallel Coordinates Visualizations," in Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization 2004, Austin, TX. Oct. 10-12, 2004
• Blaas, Botha, and Post. "Extensions of Parallel Coordinates for Interactive Exploration of Large Multi-Timepoint Data Sets," IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, vol. 14, no. 6, pp. 1436-1451, November/December, 2008. E-mail dfeng@sandia.gov or dcthomp@sandia.gov for a copy; it is not freely available.
• Fua, Ward, and Rundensteiner. "Hierarchical Parallel Coordinates for Exploration of Large Datasets," in Proceedings of the conference on Visualization '99, pp. 43-50. Oct 24-29, 1999.
• Hauser, Ledermann, and Doleisch. "Angular Brushing of Extended Parallel Coordinates," in Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization, pp. 127ff, 2002
• Novotný and Hauser. "Outlier-Preserving Focus+Context Visualization in Parallel Coordinates," IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, vol. 12, no. 5, pp. 893-900, September-October, 2006

Design alternatives

• Draw the tuples directly
• Draw histograms
• Draw histograms plus some tuples

Benchmark Implementations

• David Feng's current parallel coordinates implementation
  • Located at https://www.kitware.com/svn/vtkSNL/trunk/vtkSNL/Examples/Cxx/ParallelCoordinates
  • Uses View/Representation framework
  • Draws tuples directly as lines
• Julien Finet's upcoming scatter plot implementation
• David Thompson's old parallel coordinates + scatter plot implementation
  • Uses GLUT/OpenGL directly (no VTK) and only really tested on Linux (occasionally on MacOS X)
  • Draws tuples directly as lines or points
  • Interaction via heretofore undocumented methods:
    • Space bar: animate transition from parallel coords to scatter plots
    • Drag/drop: axis positioning/reordering
    • Page up/down: highlight a tuple
    • 'E' key: evenly space axes
    • Click-drag below plot: scrub transition from parallel coords to scatter plots
  • Email dcthomp@sandia.gov for a tarball.