Where did my Lines go? Visualizing Missing Data in Parallel Coordinates

Abstract

We evaluate visualization concepts to represent missing values in parallel coordinates. We focus on the trade-off between the ability to perceive missing values and the concept's impact on common tasks. For this purpose, we identified three missing value representation concepts: removing line segments where values are missing, adding a separate, horizontal axis onto which missing values are projected, and using imputed values as a replacement for missing values. For the missing values axis and imputed values concepts, we additionally add downplay and highlight variations. We performed a crowd-sourced, quantitative user study with 732 participants comparing the concepts and their variations using five real-world datasets. Based on our findings, we provide suggestions regarding which visual encoding to employ depending on the task at focus.