VizCertify: A Framework for Secure Visual Data Exploration

Abstract

Recently, there have been several proposals to develop visual recommendation systems. The most advanced systems aim to recommend visualizations, which help users to find new correlations or identify an interesting deviation based on the current context of the user’s analysis. However, when recommending a visualization to a user, there is an inherent risk to visualize random fluctuations rather than solely true patterns: a problem largely ignored by current techniques. In this paper, we present VizCertify, a novel framework to improve the performance of visual recommendation systems by quantifying the statistical significance of recommended visualizations. The proposed methodology allows to control the probability of misleading visual recommendations using both classical statistical testing procedures and a novel application of the Vapnik Chervonenkis (VC) dimension towards visualization recommendation which results in an effective criterion to decide whether a recommendation corresponds to a true phenomenon or not.