A general framework for a principled hierarchical visualization of multivariate data

Abstract

We present a general framework for interactive visualization and analysis of multi-dimensional data points. The proposed model is a hierarchical extension of the latent trait family of models developed in [4] as a generalization of GTM to noise models from the exponential family of distributions. As some members of the exponential family of distributions are suitable for modeling discrete observations, we give a brief example of using our methodology in interactive visualization and semantic discovery in a corpus of text-based documents. We also derive formulas for computing local magnification factors of latent trait projection manifolds.