Laboratory of Informatics of Grenoble Équipe Ingénierie de l'Interaction Humain-Machine

Équipe Ingénierie de l'Interaction
Humain-Machine

Improving Visualization of Large Hierarchical Clustering

In Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Information Visualisation (IV 2012). pages 220-228. 2012.

Gilles Bisson, Renaud Blanch

Abstract

The classical representation of a binary tree generated by a hierarchical clustering is a node-link-based visualization denoted as a dendrogram.
It allows users to explore in a simple way the clusters and the relationships between instances.
However, exploration of large dendrograms is known to be difficult due to the graphical and cognitive information overload involved.
Here, we discuss the current approaches and we introduce Stacked Trees, a new Focus+Context visualization technique that allows the exploration of the hierarchical clustering of up to fifty thousands nodes on a standard-sized screen.