Visual Exploration of a Series of Academic Conferences

The trends in a research field, especially changes in the features over the years, are subjects of interest for many researchers. This paper reports an exploratory analysis of the changes of research topics in an academic field. The target data of the analysis are the author-keywords included in papers presented at a series of academic conferences, IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM). The analysis process consists of three phases: (1) frequency of keywords, (2) appearance of keywords in papers, and (3) relationships among keywords. In phase 1, bar charts were used to observe the ranking of frequencies. In phases 2 and 3, anchored maps were adopted. The anchored maps are based on the spring-embedder model, but they provide viewpoints by using fixed "anchors." The analysis process revealed the major topics in the field of data mining and some changes in the relationships among topics.