Employing artificial neural networks for constructing metadata-based model to automatically select an appropriate data visualization technique

Advances in computing technology have been instrumental in creating an assortment of powerful information visualization techniques. However, the selection of a suitable and effective visualization technique for a specific dataset and a data mining task is not trivial. This work automatically selects an appropriate visualization technique based on the given metadata and the task that a user intends to perform. The appropriate visualization is predicted based on an artificial neural network (ANN)-based model which classifies the input data into one of the eight predefined classes. A purpose built dataset extracted from the existing knowledge in the discipline is utilized to train the neural network. The dataset covers eight visualization techniques, including: histogram, line chart, pie chart, scatter plot, parallel coordinates, map, treemap, and linked graph. Various architectures using different numbers of hidden units, hidden layers, and input and output data formats have been evaluated to find the optimal neural network architecture. The performance of neural networks is measured using: confusion matrix, accuracy, precision, and sensitivity of the classification. Optimal neural network architecture is determined by convergence time and number of iterations. The results obtained from the best ANN architecture are compared with five other classifiers, k-nearest neighbor, naive Bayes, decision tree, random forest, and support vector machine. The proposed system outperforms four classifiers in terms of accuracy and all five classifiers based on execution time. The trained neural network is also tested on twenty real-world benchmark datasets, where the proposed approach also provides two alternate visualizations, in addition to the most suitable one, for a particular dataset. A qualitative comparison with the state-of-the-art approaches is also presented. The results show that the proposed technique assists in selecting an appropriate visualization technique for a given dataset with high accuracy. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.