Towards Addressing Ambiguous Interactions and Inferring User Intent with Dimension Reduction and Clustering Combinations in Visual Analytics

Direct manipulation interactions on projections are often incorporated in visual analytics applications. These interactions enable analysts to provide incremental feedback to the system in a semi-supervised manner, demonstrating relationships that the analyst wishes to find within the data. However, determining the precise intent of the analyst is a challenge. When an analyst interacts with a projection, the inherent ambiguity of interactions can lead to a variety of possible interpretations that the system can infer. Previous work has demonstrated the utility of clusters as an interaction target to address this “With Respect to What” problem in dimension-reduced projections. However, the introduction of clusters introduces interaction inference challenges as well. In this work, we discuss the interaction space for the simultaneous use of semi-supervised dimension reduction and clustering algorithms. We introduce a novel pipeline representation to disambiguate between interactions on observations and clusters, as well as which underlying model is responding to those analyst interactions. We use a prototype visual analytics tool to demonstrate the effects of these ambiguous interactions, their properties, and the insights that an analyst can glean from each.