The Value of Visualization for Understanding Data and Making Decisions

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Presented at JISIC 2014 by

John Stasko

Investigators have an ever-growing suite of tools available for analyzing and understanding their data. While techniques such as statistical analysis, machine learning, and data mining all have benefits, visualization provides an additional unique set of capabilities, many of which relate to its interactive capabilities. In this talk I identify the particular advantages that visualization brings to data analysis beyond other techniques, and I will describe the situations in which it can be most beneficial. To help support these arguments, I'll present a number of provocative examples from my own work and others'. One particular system will demonstrate how visualization can facilitate exploration and knowledge acquisition from a collection of thousands of narrative text documents.