Visualizations are frequently used as a means to understand trends and gather
insights from datasets, but often take a long time to generate. In this paper,
we focus on the problem of rapidly generating approximate visualizations while
preserving crucial visual proper- ties of interest to analysts. Our primary
focus will be on sampling algorithms that preserve the visual property of
ordering; our techniques will also apply to some other visual properties. For
instance, our algorithms can be used to generate an approximate visualization
of a bar chart very rapidly, where the comparisons between any two bars are
correct. We formally show that our sampling algorithms are generally applicable
and provably optimal in theory, in that they do not take more samples than
necessary to generate the visualizations with ordering guarantees. They also
work well in practice, correctly ordering output groups while taking orders of
magnitude fewer samples and much less time than conventional sampling schemes.Comment: Tech Report. 17 pages. Condensed version to appear in VLDB Vol. 8 No.
