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Requirements for interactive graphics software for exploratory data analysis

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Summary

Interactive graphics tools are an essential component of EDA. This paper proposes a basic set of requirements for interactive graphics software. To be fully effective it needs fast, flexible and usable implementations of the following interactive tools: direct querying, zooming, rescaling, selection with linking, and the use of multiple views. In addition, it needs to support all these operations for selected subgroups. The interface must be consistent throughout and each tool or method must be fully integrated into the system. These points are discussed and illustrated with examples.

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Acknowledgements

The department of Computer-Oriented Statistics and Data Analysis is supported by the Volkswagen Foundation. Thanks are due to the members of the Augsburg group for many helpful discussions and advice and to a particularly helpful referee.

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Unwin, A. Requirements for interactive graphics software for exploratory data analysis. Computational Statistics 14, 7–22 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1007/PL00022706

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