Meta parallel coordinates for visualizing features in large, high-dimensional, time-varying data

Managing computational complexity and designing effective visual representations are two important challenges for the visualization of large, complex, high-dimensional datasets. Parallel coordinates are an effective technique for visualizing high-dimensional data, but do not scale well to very large datasets. The addition of the temporal dimension leads to more uncertainty due to clutter on screen. Consequently, this poses a significant challenge for visually finding trends and patterns that maximize insight about the underlying time-varying properties of the data. To address these problems, we present meta parallel coordinates, a parallel coordinates display that is guided by perceptually motivated visual metrics. These metrics describe the visual structures typically found in parallel coordinates and thus aid the user´s analysis by providing meaningful views of the data. Since they are computed in screen space, our metrics are computationally more efficient than data-based metrics. Our choice of metrics is driven by the different analytical tasks that a user typically wants to perform with time-varying multivariate data. In particular, we have worked with domain scientists who performed simulations of bioremediation experiments, and use their data and results to demonstrate the usefulness of our approach.