Exploring Distributions: Design and Evaluation

Visual overviews of tables of numerical and categorical data have been proposed for tables with a single value per cell. In this paper we address the problem of exploring tables including columns consisting of distributions, e.g. the distributions of movie ratings or trust ratings in recommender systems, age distributions in demographic data, usage distributions in logs of telephone calls etc. We propose a novel way of displaying and interacting with distribution data, and present the results of a usability study that demonstrates the benefits of the interface in providing an overview of the data and facilitating the discovery of interesting clusters, patterns, outliers and relationships between columns.