User-driven Feature Space Transformation

Abstract

Interactive visualization systems for exploring and manipulating high-dimensional feature spaces have experienced a substantial progress in the last few years. State-of-art methods rely on solid mathematical and computational foundations that enable sophisticated and flexible interactive tools. Current methods are even capable of modifying data attributes during interaction, highlighting regions of potential interest in the feature space, and building visualizations that bring out the relevance of attributes. However, those methodologies rely on complex and non-intuitive interfaces that hamper the free handling of the feature spaces. Moreover, visualizing how neighborhood structures are affected during the space manipulation is also an issue for existing methods. This paper presents a novel visualization-assisted methodology for interacting and transforming data attributes embedded in feature spaces. The proposed approach relies on a combination of multidimensional projections and local transformations to provide an interactive mechanism for modifying attributes. Besides enabling a simple and intuitive visual layout, our approach allows the user to easily observe the changes in neighborhood structures during interaction. The usefulness of our methodology is shown in an application geared to image retrieval.