3DSPOPP - 3D Scatter Plots of Octants with Projection Planes

This paper proposes a web-based visualization tool called 3DSPOPP for visualizing the relationship between sets of attributes as two data points put on separate planes and connected by a line in a 3D scatter plot. The motivation for creating this tool is to visualize darknet traffic data to find communication anomalies. Although 3D scatter plots can visualize network packet data by assigning time, source IP address and destination IP address to each axis, users can not easily understand the relationship between one set of source IP addresses and source ports and another set of destination IP addresses and destination ports. For anomaly detection, these four attributes are all significant. Therefore, the authors elongate each axis to create multiple plot zones of up to eight separate areas in 3D space, usually called octants. This tool is called 3D Scatter Plots of Octants, abbreviated as 3DSPO. Furthermore, projection planes of two octants are combined with 3DSPO to visualize the relationship between two attribute pairs of two octants such as source IP/port pair and destination IP/port pair. This combined tool is called 3DSPOPP.