Visual analysis for mutual fund performance

Mutual funds are one of the most important investment instruments available. However, choosing among mutual funds is not an easy task because they vary in many different dimensions, such as asset size, turnover and fee structure, and these characteristics may affect fund returns. It is thus important to understand the relation between fund performance and these properties. In this work, we use a new visual analytical tool, the density-based distribution map, to assist in this task. By visualizing various important fund characteristics from a real-world database of the US stock funds, our new visual representations greatly help understand the relation between fund characteristics and returns.