This month's data visualization edition of the Business Intelligence newsletter features the visual analysis of multivariate data. The business intelligence industry prides itself in its ability to enable rich analyses of multidimensional (a.k.a., multivariate) business data, but the traditional text-based methods, such as pivot tables, can provide only a fraction of the insight that the best visualization tools and techniques make possible.
In my article, I provide an overview of visual multivariate analysis – what it is, what we can learn from it, and a brief introduction to five powerful visualizations for this type of analysis. One of these five visualizations is called TableLens, which was first developed by Ramana Rao and Stuart Card when they both worked at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). Since that time, Ramana Rao helped to found the software company Inxight, which developed commercial implementations of TableLens. Because he knows it so well, I invited Ramana to write an article to introduce TableLens to you. His article, TableLens: A Clear Window for Viewing Multivariate Data, explains the concept, how it was born, what it does, and how it works. TableLens provides a simple interface for exploring large sets of multivariate data to find meaningful correlations and exceptions.
Let me remind you one last time that submissions to the Business Intelligence Network's first annual data visualization competition are due by July 14th. I will begin featuring the winning submissions next month in the August edition of this newsletter.
Take care,
An Introduction to Visual Multivariate Analysis
by Stephen Few
Traditional text-based methods for analysis of multivariate data, such as pivot tables, can provide only a fraction of the insight that the best visualization tools and techniques make possible.
TableLens: A Clear Window for Viewing Multivariate Data
by Ramana Rao
Correlations and exceptions in multivariate data become clearly visible when explored using TableLens.
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