Foresight: Rapid Data Exploration Through Guideposts

Understand

Current tools for exploratory data analysis (EDA) require users to manually select data attributes, statistical computations and visual encodings.

• This can be daunting for large-scale, complex data.
• We introduce Foresight, a visualization recommender system that helps the user rapidly explore large high-dimensional datasets through "guideposts." A guidepost is a visualization corresponding to a pronounced instance of a statistical descriptor of the underlying data, such as a strong linear correlation between two attributes, high skewness or concentration about the mean of a single attribute, or a strong clustering of values.
• For each descriptor, Foresight initially presents visualizations of the "strongest" instances, based on an appropriate ranking metric.