Skip to main content

Visual Analytics and Similarity Search: Concepts and Challenges for Effective Retrieval Considering Users, Tasks, and Data

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 10609))

Abstract

A major challenge of the contemporary information age is the overwhelming and increasing data amount, especially when looking for specific information. Searching for relevant information is no longer manually possible, but has to rely on automatic methods, specifically, similarity search. From a formal perspective, similarity search can be seen as the problem of finding entities, which are considered to be similar to a query with respect to certain describing features. The question which features or which weighted combination of features to use for a given query creates a need for semi-automatic methods to address the needs of diverse users. Furthermore, the quality of the results of a similarity search is more than effectiveness, measured by precision and recall. The user ideally needs to trust the results and understand how they were computed. We propose to apply Visual Analytics methodologies, for synergistic cooperation of user and algorithms, to integrate three key dimensions of similarity search: users, tasks, and data for effective search. However, there exists a gap in knowledge how user, task as well as the available data influence each other and the similarity search. In this concept paper, we envision how Visual Analytics can be used to tackle current challenges of similarity search.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Buying options

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD   54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD   69.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

References

  1. Adomavicius, G., Tuzhilin, A.: Context-aware recommender systems. In: Ricci, F., Rokach, L., Shapira, B. (eds.) Recommender Systems Handbook, pp. 191–226. Springer, Boston, MA (2015). doi:10.1007/978-1-4899-7637-6_6

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  2. Amar, R., Eagan, J., Stasko, J.: Low-level components of analytic activity in information visualization. In: 2005 IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization, INFOVIS 2005, pp. 111–117. IEEE (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Amatriain, X., Jaimes, A., Oliver, N., and Pujol, J. M. Data mining methods for recommender systems. In: Ricci, F., Rokach, L., Shapira, B., Kantor, P. (eds.) Recommender Systems Handbook, pp. 39–71. Springer, Boston (2011). doi:10.1007/978-0-387-85820-3_2

  4. Beyer, K., Goldstein, J., Ramakrishnan, R., Shaft, U.: When is “Nearest Neighbor” meaningful? In: Beeri, C., Buneman, P. (eds.) ICDT 1999. LNCS, vol. 1540, pp. 217–235. Springer, Heidelberg (1999). doi:10.1007/3-540-49257-7_15

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  5. Bobadilla, J., Ortega, F., Hernando, A., Gutiérrez, A.: Recommender systems survey. Knowl.-Based Syst. 46, 109–132 (2013)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Covington, P., Adams, J., Sargin, E.: Deep neural networks for YouTube recommendations. In: Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, pp. 191–198. ACM (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Endert, A., Fox, S., Maiti, D., North, C.: The semantics of clustering: analysis of user-generated spatializations of text documents. In: Proceedings of the International Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces, pp. 555–562. ACM (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  8. He, C., Parra, D., Verbert, K.: Interactive recommender systems: a survey of the state of the art and future research challenges and opportunities. Expert Syst. Appl. 56, 9–27 (2016)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Herlocker, J.L., Konstan, J.A., Terveen, L.G., Riedl, J.T.: Evaluating collaborative filtering recommender systems. ACM Trans. Inf. Syst. (TOIS) 22(1), 5–53 (2004)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Holmstrom, J.E.: Section III. Opening plenary session. In: The Royal Society Scientific Information Conference. Royal Society (1948)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Houle, M.E., Sakuma, J.: Fast approximate similarity search in extremely high-dimensional data sets. In: 2005 Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Data Engineering, ICDE 2005, pp. 619–630. IEEE (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Keim, D., Kohlhammer, J., Ellis, G., Mansmann, F.: Mastering the information age solving problems with visual analytics. Eurographics Association (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Lau, A.Y., Coiera, E.W.: Do people experience cognitive biases while searching for information? J. Am. Med. Inform. Assoc. 14(5), 599–608 (2007)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Lew, M.S., Sebe, N., Djeraba, C., Jain, R.: Content-based multimedia information retrieval: state of the art and challenges. ACM Trans. Multimed. Comput. Commun. Appl. (TOMM) 2(1), 1–19 (2006)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  15. Liu, K., Bellet, A., Sha, F.: Similarity learning for high-dimensional sparse data. In: AISTATS (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Needleman, S.B., Wunsch, C.D.: A general method applicable to the search for similarities in the amino acid sequence of two proteins. J. Mol. Biol. 48(3), 443–453 (1970)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. O’Mahony, M.P., Hurley, N.J., Silvestre, G.: Detecting noise in recommender system databases. In: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, pp. 109–115. ACM (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Picault, J., Ribiere, M., Bonnefoy, D., Mercer, K.: How to get the recommender out of the lab? In: Ricci, F., Rokach, L., Shapira, B., Kantor, P. (eds.) Recommender Systems Handbook, pp. 333–365. Springer, Boston (2011). doi:10.1007/978-0-387-85820-3_10

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  19. Rauber, P.E., Fadel, S.G., Falcao, A.X., Telea, A.C.: Visualizing the hidden activity of artificial neural networks. IEEE Trans. Visual Comput. Graphics 23(1), 101–110 (2017)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  20. Ricci, F., Rokach, L., Shapira, B.: Recommender systems: introduction and challenges. In: Ricci, F., Rokach, L., Shapira, B. (eds.) Recommender Systems Handbook, pp. 1–34. Springer, Boston, MA (2015). doi:10.1007/978-1-4899-7637-6_1

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  21. Sacha, D., Boesecke, I., Fuchs, J., Keim, D.A.: Analytic behavior and trust building in visual analytics. In: Proceedings of the Eurographics/IEEE VGTC Conference on Visualization: Short Papers, pp. 143–147. Eurographics Association (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Sacha, D., Stoffel, A., Stoffel, F., Kwon, B.C., Ellis, G., Keim, D.A.: Knowledge generation model for visual analytics. IEEE Trans. Visual Comput. Graphics 20(12), 1604–1613 (2014)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  23. Seebacher, D., Stein, M., Janetzko, H., Keim, D.A., Retrieval, P.: A multi-modal visual analytics approach. In: Andrienko, N., Sedlmair, M., (eds.) EuroVis Workshop on Visual Analytics (EuroVA), pp. 013–017. The Eurographics Association (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  24. Shardanand, U., Maes, P.: Social information filtering: algorithms for automating word of mouth. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 210–217. ACM Press/Addison-Wesley Publishing Co. (1995)

    Google Scholar 

  25. Smith, T.F., Waterman, M.S.: Identification of common molecular subsequences. J. Mol. Biol. 147(1), 195–197 (1981)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  26. Swearingen, K., Sinha, R.: Beyond algorithms: an HCI perspective on recommender systems. In: ACM SIGIR 2001 Workshop on Recommender Systems, vol. 13, pp. 1–11. Citeseer (2001)

    Google Scholar 

  27. Yi, J.S., Ah Kang, Y., Stasko, J.: Toward a deeper understanding of the role of interaction in information visualization. IEEE Trans. Visual Comput. Graphics 13(6), 1224–1231 (2007)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  28. Zahálka, J., Worring, M.: Towards interactive, intelligent, and integrated multimedia analytics. In: 2014 IEEE Conference on Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST), pp. 3–12. IEEE (2014)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Daniel Seebacher .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG

About this paper

Cite this paper

Seebacher, D., Häußler, J., Stein, M., Janetzko, H., Schreck, T., Keim, D.A. (2017). Visual Analytics and Similarity Search: Concepts and Challenges for Effective Retrieval Considering Users, Tasks, and Data. In: Beecks, C., Borutta, F., Kröger, P., Seidl, T. (eds) Similarity Search and Applications. SISAP 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10609. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68474-1_23

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68474-1_23

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-68473-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-68474-1

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics