Splatting the Lines in Parallel Coordinates

In this paper, we propose a novel splatting framework for clutter reduction and pattern revealing in parallel coordinates. Our framework consists of two major components: a polyline splatter for cluster detection and a segment splatter for clutter reduction. The cluster detection is performed by splatting the lines one by one into the parallel coordinates plots, and for each splatted line we enhance its neighboring lines and suppress irrelevant ones. To reduce visual clutter caused by line crossings and overlappings in the clustered results, we provide a segment splatter which represents each polyline by one segment and splats these segments with different speeds, colors, and lengths from the leftmost axis to the rightmost axis. Users can interactively control both the polyline splatting and the segment splatting processes to emphasize the features they are interested in. The experimental results demonstrate that our framework can effectively reveal some hidden patterns in parallel coordinates.