| The ability to gain insight from massive collections of data is crucial to decision-making tasks. This ability may be enhanced by Visual Analytics, the science of analytical reasoning supported by highly interactive visual interfaces. An important and often neglected aspect of analysis in the development of visual analytics techniques is accounting for uncertainty. Data is inherently uncertain and datasets are often incomplete. Furthermore, data transformations performed in the visual analytic process, such as projections and decimation, inevitably cause loss of information and thus introduce additional uncertainty, which gets propagated through the analytics process. It is important to quantify and present to the analyst both the aggregated uncertainty of the results and the impact of the sources of that uncertainty.;My dissertation research is concerned with incorporating and conveying uncertainty in the process of visual analytics. I especially address the uncertainty due to data and visual transformations, and the sensitivity of the relationship between the dependent variables in the data. The dissertation mainly consists of three projects for visual analytics in multivariate data; (1) an uncertainty visual analytic framework, where I have developed a general framework for uncertainty-aware visual analytics, (2) sensitivity scatterplots, in which I have applied the regression-based sensitivity analysis to traditional 2D scatterplots to reveal the trends between data variables, and (3) regression cubes, where I have developed an interactive 3D interface of sensitivity scatterplots that enables the visual exploration of data and variational pattern discovery.;I showed how to account for uncertainty in the visual analytics process by using sensitivity analysis, which represents a new, variational view of the analysis process [21]. The sensitivity coefficients of data and visual transformations are useful for discovering the factors that contribute most to output variability, finding stable regions of the different transformations within the original data space, and manifesting the interaction between variables, outputs, and transformations. I then showed how to augment existing visualizations with sensitivity coefficients to highlight local variation of one variable with respect to another in flow-based scatterplots [12]. I conducted an empirical study on how people interpret the high dimensional trends in 2D scatterplots, and the results proved that understanding the shape of a multi-dimensional pattern on a 2D projection remains challenging. To address this issue, I have introduced the Generalized Sensitivity Scatterplot (GSS) [13] which retains the simplicity and readability of the scatterplot. Furthermore, to incorporate user interactions in sensitivity analytics, I have created an interactive 3D extension of sensitivity scatterplots called the Regression Cube (RC) [15] to reveal salient local correlation patterns that may otherwise remain hidden in a global analysis.;As datasets increase in size and the correlations between variables expand in complexity, the uncertainty framework, sensitivity scatterplots, and regression cubes introduced in this dissertation research offer promising solutions for interactive visual exploration to understand the interplay between visual transformations and data variables, and to gain insight into high dimensional patterns in the data. |
