PI2: End-to-end Interactive Visualization Interface Generation from Queries

Interactive visualization interfaces are critical in data analysis. Yet creating new interfaces is challenging, as the developer must understand the queries needed for the desired analysis task, and then design the appropriate interface. Existing task models are too abstract to be used to automatically generate interfaces, and visualization recommenders do not take the queries nor interactions into account. PI2 is the first system to generate fully functional interactive visualization interfaces from a representative sequence of task queries. PI2 analyzes queries syntactically and proposes a novel Difftree representation that encodes the systematic variations between query abstract syntax trees. PI2 then poses interface generation as a schema mapping problem from each Difftree to a visualization that renders its results, and the variations encoded in each Difftree to interactions in the interface. Interface generation further takes the layout and screen size into account. Our user studies show that PI2 interfaces are comparable to or better than those designed by developers, and that PI2 can generate exploration interfaces that are easier to use than the state-of-the-art SQL notebook products. What's more, PI2 generates high-quality interfaces within a few seconds.