Interactive data summarization: an example application

Summarizing large multidimensional datasets is a challenging task, often requiring extensive investigation by a user to identify overall trends and important exceptions to them. While many visualization tools help a user produce a single summary of the data at a time, they require the user to explore the dataset manually. Our idea is to have the computer perform an exhaustive search and inform the user about where further investigation is warranted. Our algorithm takes a large, multidimensional dataset as input, along with a specification of the user's goals, and produces a concise summary that can be clearly visualized in bar graphs or linegraphs. We demonstrate our techniques in a sample prototype for summarizing information stored in spreadsheet databases.