UnDRground Tubes: Exploring Spatial Data with Multidimensional Projections and Set Visualization

In various scientific and industrial domains, analyzing multivariate spatial data, i.e., vectors associated with spatial locations, is common practice. To analyze those datasets, analysts may turn to methods such as Spatial Blind Source Separation (SBSS). Designed explicitly for spatial data analysis, SBSS finds latent components in the dataset and is superior to popular non-spatial methods, like PCA. However, when analysts try different tuning parameter settings, the amount of latent components complicates analytical tasks. Based on our years-long collaboration with SBSS researchers, we propose a visualization approach to tackle this challenge. The main component is UnDRground Tubes (UT), a general-purpose idiom combining ideas from set visualization and multidimensional projections. We describe the UT visualization pipeline and integrate UT into an interactive multiple-view system. We demonstrate its effectiveness through interviews with SBSS experts, a qualitative evaluation with visualization experts, and computational experiments. SBSS experts were excited about our approach. They saw many benefits for their work and potential applications for geostatistical data analysis more generally. UT was also well received by visualization experts. Our benchmarks show that UT projections and its heuristics are appropriate.