Task-at-hand interface for change detection in stock market data

ABSTRACT

Companies trading stocks need to store information on stock prices over specific time intervals, which results in very large databases. Large quantities of numerical data (thousands of records) are virtually impossible to understand quickly and require the use of a visual model, since that is the fastest way for a human brain to absorb those enormous collections of data. However, little work has been done on verifying which visualizations are more suitable to represent these data sets. Such work is of crucial importance, since it enables us to identify those useful visual models and, in addition, opens our minds to new research possibilities. This paper presents an empirical study of different visualizations, that have been employed for stock market data, by comparing the results obtained by all studied techniques in typical exploratory data analysis tasks. This work provides several research contributions to the design of advanced visual data exploration interfaces.

REFERENCES

• 1: Chernoff, H. The use of faces to represent points in k-dimensional space graphically. Journal Amer. Statistical Association 68 (1973), 361--368.
• 2: Alfred Inselberg , Bernard Dimsdale, Parallel coordinates: a tool for visualizing multi-dimensional geometry, Proceedings of the 1st conference on Visualization '90, October 23-26, 1990, San Francisco, California
• 3: Brian Johnson , Ben Shneiderman, Tree-Maps: a space-filling approach to the visualization of hierarchical information structures, Proceedings of the 2nd conference on Visualization '91, October 22-25, 1991, San Diego, California
• 4: Daniel A. Keim, Information Visualization and Visual Data Mining, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, v.8 n.1, p.1-8, January 2002 [doi>10.1109/2945.981847]
• 5: Daniel A. Keim , Mihael Ankerst , Hans-Peter Kriegel, Recursive Pattern: A Technique for Visualizing Very Large Amounts of Data, Proceedings of the 6th conference on Visualization '95, p.279, October 29-November 03, 1995
• 6: Haim Levkowitz, Color icons: merging color and texture perception for integrated visualization of multiple parameters, Proceedings of the 2nd conference on Visualization '91, October 22-25, 1991, San Diego, California
• 7: Ben Shneiderman , Martin Wattenberg, Ordered Treemap Layouts, Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization 2001 (INFOVIS'01), p.73, October 22-23, 2001
• 8: Ben Shneiderman, The Eyes Have It: A Task by Data Type Taxonomy for Information Visualizations, Proceedings of the 1996 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages, p.336, September 03-06, 1996
• 9: Michelle X. Zhou , Steven K. Feiner, Visual task characterization for automated visual discourse synthesis, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.392-399, April 18-23, 1998, Los Angeles, California, United States [doi>10.1145/274644.274698]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)

Additional Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.6 SIMULATION AND MODELING
      I.6.8 Types of Simulation
          Subjects: Visual

  J. Computer Applications
  J.1 ADMINISTRATIVE DATA PROCESSING
      Subjects: Marketing

General Terms:
Design, Theory