Straightforward Working Principles Behind Modern Data Visualization Approaches

Abstract

From state-of-the-art visualization algorithms, we distill six working principles which are, by hypothesis, sufficient to produce visual projections qualitatively similar to those obtained with these state-of-the-art algorithms. These working principles are presented through the geometrical reasoning of the classical Multidimensional Scaling algorithm, and their effectiveness is illustrated through a novel straightforward algorithm for data visualization. We show, using several datasets originated from various applications, that our algorithm can produce visual projections qualitatively similar to those obtained with these state-of-the-art algorithms. Besides, under the same motivation (of simplification), the problem of visualizing large datasets is tackled through a companion algorithm which is able to embed new input patterns.

Keywords

• Data visualization
• LargeVis
• multidimensional scaling
• t-SNE
• UMAP