CS 69191: Masters Seminar
CS 89191: Doctoral Seminar

Spring 2009


Doctoral Student Presentation:
Tile-based Parallel Coordinates with Interactive Transfer Functions

Jamal Alsakran


Parallel coordinates has been widely used in information visualization applications and achieved a great success. However, visual clutter will weaken or even diminish its ability when the data size increases. In this paper, we first represent the parallel coordinates display as a tile-based image, where the plotting area is divided into rectangular tiles. Each tile stores an intersection density that counts the total number of polylines intersect with that tile. Consequently, the intersection density is mapped to optical attributes, such as color and opacity, by interactive transfer functions. The method visualizes the polylines efficiently and informatively in accordance with the density distribution, and thus, reduces visual cluttering and promotes knowledge discovery. We apply the method on a real world data set, U.S. stock mutual fund data of year 2006, to demonstrate its capability and success for conveying perceptual information and assisting in financial analysis.