Multivariate Data Explanation by Jumping Emerging Patterns Visualization

Multivariate or multidimensional visualization plays an essential role in exploratory data analysis by allowing users to derive insights and formulate hypotheses. Despite their popularity, it is usually users’ responsibility to (visually) discover the data patterns, which can be cumbersome and time-consuming. Visual Analytics (VA) and machine learning techniques can be instrumental in mitigating this problem by automatically discovering and representing such patterns. One example is the integration of classification models with (visual) interpretability strategies, where models are used as surrogates for data patterns so that understanding a model enables understanding the phenomenon represented by the data. Although useful and inspiring, the few proposed solutions are based on visual representations of so-called black-box models, so the interpretation of the patterns captured by the models is not straightforward, requiring mechanisms to transform them into human-understandable pieces of information. This paper presents multiVariate dAta eXplanation (VAX), a new VA method to support identifying and visual interpreting patterns in multivariate datasets. Unlike the existing similar approaches, VAX uses the concept of Jumping Emerging Patterns, inherent interpretable logic statements representing class-variable relationships (patterns) derived from random Decision Trees. The potential of VAX is shown through use cases employing two real-world datasets covering different scenarios where intricate patterns are discovered and represented, something challenging to be done using usual exploratory approaches.