Reducing InfoVis cluttering through non uniform sampling, displacement, and user perception

Clutter affects almost any kind of visual technique and can obscure the structure present in the data even in small datasets, making it hard for users to find patterns and reveal relationships. In this paper we present a general strategy to analyze and reduce clutter using a special kind of sampling, together with an ad-hoc displacement technique and perceptual issues collected through a user study. The method, defined for 2D scatter plots, is flexible enough to be used in quite different contexts. In particular, in this paper we prove its usefulness against scatter plot, radviz, and parallel coordinates visualizations. © 2006 SPIE-IS&T.