Data Exploration with Paired Hierarchical Visualizations: Initial Designs of Pair Trees

Paired hierarchical visualizations (PairTrees) integrate treemaps, node-link diagrams, choropleth maps and other information visualization techniques to support exploration of hierarchical data sets at multiple levels of abstraction (Kules, Shneiderman et al., in press). Coordinated visualizations are an effective way to support exploratory data analysis of multidimensional data sets. Hierarchies are often used to reduce complexity, show structure, and support reasoning at multiple levels of abstraction or aggregation. Our work seeks to integrate hierarchical and coordinated visualizations, taking advantage of the semantics embedded in aggregate, sub-class, containment, and other forms of hierarchy.