Learning to Recommend Visualizations from Data

Abstract

Visualization recommendation is important for exploratory analysis and making sense of the data quickly by automatically recommending relevant visualizations to the user. In this work, we propose the first end-to-end ML-based visualization recommendation system that leverages a large corpus of datasets and their relevant visualizations to learn a visualization recommendation model automatically. Then, given a new unseen dataset from an arbitrary user, the model automatically generates visualizations for that new dataset, derives scores for the visualizations, and outputs a list of recommended visualizations to the user ordered by effectiveness. We also describe an evaluation framework to quantitatively evaluate visualization recommendation models learned from a large corpus of visualizations and datasets. Through quantitative experiments, a user study, and qualitative analysis, we show that our end-to-end ML-based system recommends more effective and useful visualizations compared to existing state-of-the-art rule-based systems. © 2021 ACM.