Coordinating computational and visual approaches for interactive feature selection and multivariate clustering

Received: KK Revised: KK Accepted: KK Abstract Unknown (and unexpected) multivariate patterns lurking in high-dimensional datasets are often very hard to find. This paper describes a human-centered exploration environment, which incorporates a coordinated suite of computational and visualization methods to explore high-dimensional data for uncovering patterns in multivariate spaces. Specifically, it includes: (1) an interactive feature selection method for identifying potentially interesting, multidimensional subspaces from a high-dimensional data space, (2) an interactive, hierarchical clustering method for searching multivariate clusters of arbitrary shape, and (3) a suite of coordinated visualization and computational components centered around the above two methods to facilitate a human-led exploration. The implemented system is used to analyze a cancer dataset and shows that it is efficient and effective for discovering unknown and unexpected multivariate patterns from high-dimensional data. Information Visualization (2003) 00, 000–000. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ivs.9500053