Visually Mining the Datacube using a Pixel-Oriented Technique

This paper introduces a new technique easing the navigation and interactive exploration of huge multidimensional datasets. Following the pixel-oriented paradigm [8], the key ingredients enabling the interactive navigation of extreme volumes of data rely on a set of functions bijectively mapping data elements to screen pixels. The use of the mapping from data elements to pixels constrain the computational complexity for the rendering process to be linear with respect to the number of rendered pixels on the screen as opposed to the dataset size. Our method furthermore allows the implementation of usual information visualization techniques such as zoom and pan, anamorphosis and texturing. As a proof-of-concept, we show how our technique can be adapted to interactively explore the Datacube, turning our approach into an efficient system for visual datamining. We report experiments conducted on a Datacube containing 50 millions of items. To our knowledge, our technique outperforms all existing ones and push the scalability limit close to the billion of elements. Supporting all basic navigation techniques, and being moreover flexible makes it easily reusable for a large number of applications.