LineSmooth : An Analytical Framework for Evaluating the Effectiveness of Smoothing Techniques on Line Charts

We present a comprehensive framework for evaluating line chart smoothing methods under a variety of visual analytics tasks. Line charts are commonly used to visualize a series of data samples. When the number of samples is large, or the data are noisy, smoothing can be applied to make the signal mor...

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Veröffentlicht in:IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics. - 1996. - 27(2021), 2 vom: 13. Feb., Seite 1536-1546
1. Verfasser: Rosen, Paul (VerfasserIn)
Weitere Verfasser: Quadri, Ghulam Jilani
Format: Online-Aufsatz
Sprache:English
Veröffentlicht: 2021
Zugriff auf das übergeordnete Werk:IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics
Schlagworte:Journal Article
Beschreibung
Zusammenfassung:We present a comprehensive framework for evaluating line chart smoothing methods under a variety of visual analytics tasks. Line charts are commonly used to visualize a series of data samples. When the number of samples is large, or the data are noisy, smoothing can be applied to make the signal more apparent. However, there are a wide variety of smoothing techniques available, and the effectiveness of each depends upon both nature of the data and the visual analytics task at hand. To date, the visualization community lacks a summary work for analyzing and classifying the various smoothing methods available. In this paper, we establish a framework, based on 8 measures of the line smoothing effectiveness tied to 8 low-level visual analytics tasks. We then analyze 12 methods coming from 4 commonly used classes of line chart smoothing-rank filters, convolutional filters, frequency domain filters, and subsampling. The results show that while no method is ideal for all situations, certain methods, such as Gaussian filters and TOPOLOGY-based subsampling, perform well in general. Other methods, such as low-pass CUTOFF filters and Douglas-peucker subsampling, perform well for specific visual analytics tasks. Almost as importantly, our framework demonstrates that several methods, including the commonly used UNIFORM subsampling, produce low-quality results, and should, therefore, be avoided, if possible
Beschreibung:Date Revised 03.02.2021
published: Print-Electronic
Citation Status PubMed-not-MEDLINE
ISSN:1941-0506
DOI:10.1109/TVCG.2020.3030421