Interactive Visualization of Large Data Sets

Visualization provides a powerful means for data analysis. But to be practical, visual analytics tools must support smooth and flexible use of visualizations at a fast rate. This becomes increasingly onerous with the ever-increasing size of real-world datasets. First, large databases make interaction more difficult once query response time exceeds several seconds. Second, any attempt to show all data points will overload the visualization, resulting in chaos that will only confuse the user. Over the last few years, substantial effort has been put into addressing both of these issues and many innovative solutions have been proposed. Indeed, data visualization is a topic that is too large to be addressed in a single survey paper. Thus, we restrict our attention here to interactive visualization of large data sets. Our focus then is skewed in a natural way towards query processing problem—provided by an underlying database system—rather than to the actual data visualization problem.