SPLAT: A visualization tool for mining Internet measurements

Visualizations provide a natural means for organizing large complex data sets and mining them for characteristics of interest. In this paper, we describe SPLAT, a scatter and phase plot animation tool. SPLAT offers a broad set of capabilities for investigating Internet measurement data sets based on scatter and phase plots—two well-known techniques for exploratory data analysis. An important feature of SPLAT is that it can animate the scatter and phase plots over time to reveal dynamic characteristics of the data at hand. We demonstrate SPLAT’s capabilities through a series of case studies that show how both general profiles and important non-obvious details in large Internet data sets can be identified thereby illustrating its utility for a diverse set of network research areas.