Active Learning for Interactive Visualization

Many automatic visualization methods have been proposed. However, a visualization that is automatically generated might be different to how a user wants to arrange the objects in visualization space. By allowing users to re-locate objects in the embedding space of the visualization, they can adjust the visualization to their preference. We propose an active learning framework for interactive visualization which selects objects for the user to re-locate so that they can obtain their desired visualization by re-locating as few as possible. The framework is based on an information theoretic criterion, which favors objects that reduce the uncertainty of the visualization. We present a concrete application of the proposed framework to the Laplacian eigenmap visualization method. We demonstrate experimentally that the proposed framework yields the desired visualization with fewer user interactions than existing methods.