Multivariate data visualization: A review from the perception aspect

Abstract

Last two decades have seen the development of varieties of new methods for visualizing multivariable data and a few attempts have been made to survey and compare some of these techniques. Despite valuable reviews, they did not systematically study the perception tasks involved in these techniques which affect the efficiency of their information decoding due to limited humans' visual perception system. This paper serves to fill this gap through reviewing three well known multivariate visualization techniques apropos their associated perception tasks for three data exploration purposes. Advantages and disadvantages of each tool are discussed. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.