3D Parallel Coordinates for Multidimensional Data Cube Exploration

Visual analytics becomes an important approach for discovering patterns in big data. As visualization struggles from high dimensionality of data, issues like concept hierarchy on each dimension add more difficulty and make visualization a prohibitive task. Data cube offers multi-perspective aggregated views of large data sets and has important applications in business and many other areas. It has high dimensionality, concept hierarchy, vast number of cells, and comes with special exploration operations such as roll-up, drill-down, slicing and dicing. All these issues make data cubes very difficult to visually explore. Most existing approaches visualize a data cube in 2D space and require preprocessing steps. In this paper, we propose a visualization technique for visual analytics of data cubes using parallel coordinates. The proposed technique extends parallel coordinates to a 3D space to reflect concept hierarchy, display cube cells intuitively, and support data cube operations visually and interactively.