SimpleSets: Capturing Categorical Point Patterns with Simple Shapes

Fuente: arXiv
Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Broek, Steven van den, Meulemans, Wouter, Speckmann, Bettina
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866929427929104384
author Broek, Steven van den
Meulemans, Wouter
Speckmann, Bettina
author_facet Broek, Steven van den
Meulemans, Wouter
Speckmann, Bettina
contents Points of interest on a map such as restaurants, hotels, or subway stations, give rise to categorical point data: data that have a fixed location and one or more categorical attributes. Consequently, recent years have seen various set visualization approaches that visually connect points of the same category to support users in understanding the spatial distribution of categories. Existing methods use complex and often highly irregular shapes to connect points of the same category, leading to high cognitive load for the user. In this paper we introduce SimpleSets, which uses simple shapes to enclose categorical point patterns, thereby providing a clean overview of the data distribution. SimpleSets is designed to visualize sets of points with a single categorical attribute; as a result, the point patterns enclosed by SimpleSets form a partition of the data. We give formal definitions of point patterns that correspond to simple shapes and describe an algorithm that partitions categorical points into few such patterns. Our second contribution is a rendering algorithm that transforms a given partition into a clean set of shapes resulting in an aesthetically pleasing set visualization. Our algorithm pays particular attention to resolving intersections between nearby shapes in a consistent manner. We compare SimpleSets to the state-of-the-art set visualizations using standard datasets from the literature.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_14433
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SimpleSets: Capturing Categorical Point Patterns with Simple Shapes
Broek, Steven van den
Meulemans, Wouter
Speckmann, Bettina
Computational Geometry
Points of interest on a map such as restaurants, hotels, or subway stations, give rise to categorical point data: data that have a fixed location and one or more categorical attributes. Consequently, recent years have seen various set visualization approaches that visually connect points of the same category to support users in understanding the spatial distribution of categories. Existing methods use complex and often highly irregular shapes to connect points of the same category, leading to high cognitive load for the user. In this paper we introduce SimpleSets, which uses simple shapes to enclose categorical point patterns, thereby providing a clean overview of the data distribution. SimpleSets is designed to visualize sets of points with a single categorical attribute; as a result, the point patterns enclosed by SimpleSets form a partition of the data. We give formal definitions of point patterns that correspond to simple shapes and describe an algorithm that partitions categorical points into few such patterns. Our second contribution is a rendering algorithm that transforms a given partition into a clean set of shapes resulting in an aesthetically pleasing set visualization. Our algorithm pays particular attention to resolving intersections between nearby shapes in a consistent manner. We compare SimpleSets to the state-of-the-art set visualizations using standard datasets from the literature.
title SimpleSets: Capturing Categorical Point Patterns with Simple Shapes
topic Computational Geometry
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.14433