Disk diagram: An interactive visualization technique of fuzzy set operations for the analysis of fuzzy data

Abstract

Fuzzy set refers to the data set which does not have separate, distinct clusters, and they contain data elements whose membership degrees are between 0.0 and 1.0. Many fuzzy sets exist in the real world, and one of the important issues is to make a decision from the fuzzy sets using visual analytics tools by extracting information in the data set intuitively. To analyze the element data in fuzzy sets, the visualization of fuzzy sets needs to show an overview of the data with membership degree and the relationship among the sets. In this article, we suggest an interactive visualization technique of fuzzy set operations, called Disk Diagram, which offers distribution of fuzzy data and two scenarios to allow users to interpret inter-dependency among fuzzy sets. A Disk Diagram enables to depict complexity of fuzzy sets by showing the degree of resemblance between the sets with the layout of star coordinates. This article describes the use of a Disk Diagram with two different data sets such as fuzzy disease set and terror related words set. Lastly, we report the results of heuristic evaluation to show that our technique supports visual perception, usability, and knowledge discovery process in the areas of visual representation and interaction. Information Visualization (2010) 9, 220-232. doi:10.1057/ivs.2010.3