Goals

These are some of the possible uses of visualizations:

• Presentation: To comunicate ideas, convincing others. Graphics are a mean to display facts about the data in a way that others can see and understand the underlying structure and the hypothesis about the data (Rober, 2000).

• Explorative analysis (also known as Data exploration): consists in identifying structures and proprieties in a given data set. Graphics are a mean for finding and identifying structures and properties in a given data set (Card et al., 1999; Tufte, 1983; Rober, 2000). Bertin (1981, p. 16) says, it is the visual means of resolving logical problems. Some examples:
  • find (hidden) patterns, outliers, trends
  • associations,
  • finding errors
  • discover unexpected facts.

• Confirmative analysis (also known as hypothesis testing): to confirm or reject some hypothesis about the data