Spherule diagrams: A matrix-based set visualization compared with Euler diagrams

Abstract

The explosive growth of the internet, the overall computerization of the engineering, medical, business and defense sectors have created a widespread need of visualization techniques to explore large and complex datasets. As the data keeps growing in complexity, users find it difficult to navigate and understand the relationships between the sets. There are limitations such as scalability and sub-optimal layouts being produced with the state-of-the-art visualization methods such as Euler diagrams, Treemap diagrams and ConSets. So, an effective visual method is in great need to produce an optimal layout and identify set properties with ease. This motivated us to develop a novel visual method called “Spherule diagrams” to improve the analysis of set relationships effectively. Then a small-scale user preference study was conducted to compare Euler diagrams with Spherule diagrams, where 80% participants preferred Spherule diagrams for its simplicity, navigation, better layout and set ordering characteristics. The other results based on error rate and rating, Spherule diagrams outperformed Euler diagrams. Thus, we provide evidence that Spherule diagrams are preferred over Euler diagrams for visualizing set relations.