SketchPadN-D: WYDIWYG Sculpting and Editing in High-Dimensional Space
This addresses a problem for researchers in high-dimensional data visualization by providing a tool for generating and cleaning test data, though it is incremental as it builds on existing visualization paradigms.
The paper tackles the lack of diverse, feature-controlled high-dimensional test data by introducing SketchPadN-D, a tool that enables users to generate and edit such data directly within visualization interfaces, resulting in immersive and direct data creation.
High-dimensional data visualization has been attracting much attention. To fully test related software and algorithms, researchers require a diverse pool of data with known and desired features. Test data do not always provide this, or only partially. Here we propose the paradigm WYDIWYGS (What You Draw Is What You Get). Its embodiment, Sketch Pad ND, is a tool that allows users to generate high-dimensional data in the same interface they also use for visualization. This provides for an immersive and direct data generation activity, and furthermore it also enables users to interactively edit and clean existing high-dimensional data from possible artifacts. Sketch Pad ND offers two visualization paradigms, one based on parallel coordinates and the other based on a relatively new framework using an N-D polygon to navigate in high-dimensional space. The first interface allows users to draw arbitrary profiles of probability density functions along each dimension axis and sketch shapes for data density and connections between adjacent dimensions. The second interface embraces the idea of sculpting. Users can carve data at arbitrary orientations and refine them wherever necessary. This guarantees the data generated is truly high-dimensional. We demonstrate our tool's usefulness in real data visualization scenarios.