Leveraging Analysis History for Improved In Situ Visualization Recommendation

Abstract

Existing visualization recommendation systems commonly rely on a single snapshot of a dataset to suggest visualizations to users. However, exploratory data analysis involves a series of related interactions with a dataset over time rather than one-off analytical steps. We present Solas, a tool that tracks the history of a user's data analysis, models their interest in each column, and uses this information to provide visualization recommendations, all within the user's native analytical environment. Recommending with analysis history improves visualizations in three primary ways: task-specific visualizations use the provenance of data to provide sensible encodings for common analysis functions, aggregated history is used to rank visualizations by our model of a user's interest in each column, and column data types are inferred based on applied operations. We present a usage scenario and a user evaluation demonstrating how leveraging analysis history improves in situ visualization recommendations on real-world analysis tasks.