VizAssist: an interactive user assistant for visual data mining

We study in this work how a user can be guided to find a relevant visualization in the context of visual data mining. We present a state of the art on the user assistance in visual and interactive methods. We propose a user assistant called VizAssist, which aims at improving the existing approaches along three directions: it uses simpler computational models of the visualizations and the visual perception guidelines, in order to facilitate the integration of new visualizations and the definition of a mapping heuristic. VizAssist allows the user to provide feedback in a visual and interactive way, with the aim of improving the data to visualization mapping. This step is performed with an interactive genetic algorithm. Finally, VizAssist aims at proposing a free on-line tool (www.vizassist.fr) that respects the privacy of the user data. This assistant can be viewed as a global interface between the user and some of the many visualizations that are implemented with D3js.