Visual discovery of network patterns of interaction between attributes

Visual discovery of network patterns of interaction between attributes in a data set identifies emergent networks between myriads of individual data items and utilises special algorithms that aid visualisation of ‘emergent’ patterns and trends in the linkage. It complements conventional data mining methods, which assume the independence between the attributes and the independence between the values of these attributes. The approach complements analytical data mining techniques where the rules or definitions of what might constitute an exception are able to be known and specified ahead of time. For example, in the analysis of transaction data there are no known suspicious transactions. This chapter presents a human-centred visual data mining methodology that addresses the issues of depicting implicit relationships between data attributes and/or specific values of these attributes. Different aspects of the approach is demonstrated through the reflection of the analytical process in two cases: one looking at fraudulent activity which will be difficult, if not impossible to detect with conventional exception detection methods, and the other one looking at exploring a large data set of low level communication data. The chapter argues that for many problems, a ‘discovery’ phase in the investigative process based on visualisation and human cognition is a logical precedent to, and complement of, more automated ‘exception detection’ phases

Assisting Human Cognition in Visual Data Mining

As discussed in Part 1 of the book in chapter Form-Semantics-Function. A Framework for Designing Visualisation Models for Visual Data Mining the development of consistent visualisation techniques requires systematic approach related to the tasks of the visual data mining process. Chapter Visual discovery of network patterns of interaction between attributes presents a methodology based on viewing visual data mining as a reflection-in-action process. This chapter follows the same perspective and focuses on the subjective bias that may appear in visual data mining. The work is motivated by the fact that visual, though very attractive, means also subjective, and non-experts are often left to utilise visualisation methods (as an understandable alternative to the highly complex statistical approaches) without the ability to understand their applicability and limitations. The chapter presents two strategies addressing the subjective bias: guided cognition and validated cognition, which result in two types of visual data mining techniques: interaction with visual data representations, mediated by statistical techniques, and validation of the hypotheses coming as an output of the visual analysis through another analytics method, respectively