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¹GeoVISTA Center & Department of Geography, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, U.S.A.

Correspondence to: Diansheng Guo, GeoVISTA Center & Department of Geography, The Pennsylvania State University, 302 Walker Building, University Park, PA 16802, U.S.A. Tel: +1 814 865 3433; fax: +1 814 863 7943; E-mail: dguo@psu.edu

Unknown (and unexpected) multivariate patterns lurking in high-dimensional datasets are often very hard to find. This paper describes a human-centered exploration environment, which incorporates a coordinated suite of computational and visualization methods to explore high-dimensional data for uncovering patterns in multivariate spaces. Specifically, it includes: (1) an interactive feature selection method for identifying potentially interesting, multidimensional subspaces from a high-dimensional data space, (2) an interactive, hierarchical clustering method for searching multivariate clusters of arbitrary shape, and (3) a suite of coordinated visualization and computational components centered around the above two methods to facilitate a human-led exploration. The implemented system is used to analyze a cancer dataset and shows that it is efficient and effective for discovering unknown and unexpected multivariate patterns from high-dimensional data.

Information Visualization (2003) 2, 232-246. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ivs.9500053

data mining and knowledge discovery; feature selection; mutual information; entropy; interactive visualization; hierarchical clustering