Visual Data Analysis

Data Science offers a set of powerful approaches for making new discoveries from large and complex data sets. It combines aspects of mathematics, statistics, machine learning, etc. to turn vast amounts of data into new insights and knowledge. However, the sole use of automatic data science techniques for large amounts of complex data limits the human user’s possibilities in the discovery process, since the user is estranged from the process of data exploration. This chapter describes the importance of Information Visualization (InfoVis) and visual analytics (VA) within data science and how interactive visualization can be used to support analysis and decision-making, empowering and complementing data science methods. Moreover, we review perceptual and cognitive aspects, together with design and evaluation methodologies for InfoVis and VA.