AIDA-Vis
AI-based recommendation system for complex data visualizations
Start: 01/2021
End: 05/2023
AIDA-Vis developed an AI-based interactive recommendation system that supports users in selecting suitable data visualizations. The project focused on how complex data, especially spatio-temporal datasets, can be presented in a way that enables domain experts to arrive more quickly at understandable, reliable, and individually tailored visualizations. To this end, the project combined approaches from active learning, preference-based learning, and reinforcement learning. The system was designed to infer user preferences from interactions and use them to generate recommendations for suitable charts and visualization parameters. The project idea was prototypically investigated in the context of the disy Cadenza data analytics platform and tested in various application scenarios. The goal was to reduce the manual effort required to create sophisticated visualizations, improve the transparency and comprehensibility of data-based analyses, and open up new possibilities for learning assistance functions in business and location intelligence systems.
In the AIDA-Vis project, research was conducted into how machine learning methods can support the automatic recommendation and interactive personalization of data visualizations. The starting point was the observation that effective visualizations often require extensive domain knowledge, data understanding, and practical experience. At the same time, datasets, visualization types, and usage contexts are becoming increasingly complex. AIDA-Vis modeled the parametrization of visualizations as a decision-making process and investigated how user feedback in the form of simple comparisons between visualization proposals can be used to continuously improve a recommendation system. To this end, training data and metadata were created, interfaces to data sources and visualization libraries were considered, and both a learning recommender system and an interactive learning module were designed.
FZI contributed its expertise in artificial intelligence, machine learning, interactive learning, and reinforcement learning to the project. FZI was involved in the scientific and technical conception of the system and supported Disy in implementing the learning recommendation system. One of FZI’s main focuses was the development of algorithms for interactive learning: users were intended to provide feedback through simple preference decisions between visualization proposals, which would then be used to train and improve the recommender. In addition, FZI provided scientific support for the system design and evaluation, contributed prior work on structured decision-making problems, interactive and automated machine learning, multimodal knowledge representations, and took on tasks related to scientific dissemination and project networking.
