Interactive and iterative visual clustering

Abstract

This article proposes a semi-interactive system for visual data exploration using an iterative clustering that combines an automatic approach with an interactive one. We propose a framework to improve the interactivity between the user and the data analysis process, allowing him or her to participate actively in the iterative clustering tasks using a two-dimensional projection. Defining a cluster by its seed (center) and its limit, the proposed approach allows the user to modify the automated values or to define new seeds and the associated cluster limit himself or herself. The user can perform the clustering according to his or her visual perception manually and can also choose to let the automated approach find optimal seeds and then interact with the process to iterate the clustering process according to his or her visual perception and domain knowledge. Most of the evaluation criteria for clustering evaluate the complete clustering and not each cluster separately. In this article, we propose to adapt evaluation criteria to single clusters, allowing the users to evaluate their own clusters and perform the clustering iteratively until satisfaction. To evaluate our proposed approach, we conduct a user evaluation, where the users are asked to perform clustering interactively according to their visual perception and with the semi-interactive one. We also compare the obtained results with those of automated clustering. The quantitative results have shown that the cooperative approach can improve the clustering results in terms of accuracy.