The high performance of tree ensemble classifiers benefits from a large set of rules, which, in turn, makes the models hard to understand. To improve interpretability, existing methods extract a subset of rules for approximation using model reduction techniques. However, by focusing on the reduced rule set, these methods often lose fidelity and ignore anomalous rules that, despite their infrequency, play crucial roles in real-world applications. This paper introduces a scalable visual analysis method to explain tree ensemble classifiers that contain tens of thousands of rules. The key idea is to address the issue of losing fidelity by adaptively organizing the rules as a hierarchy rather than reducing them. To ensure the inclusion of anomalous rules, we develop an anomaly-biased model reduction method to prioritize these rules at each hierarchical level. Synergized with this hierarchical organization of rules, we develop a matrix-based hierarchical visualization to support exploration at different levels of detail. Our quantitative experiments and case studies demonstrate how our method fosters a deeper understanding of both common and anomalous rules, thereby enhancing interpretability without sacrificing comprehensiveness.

Recent advances in artificial intelligence largely benefit from better neural network architectures. These architectures are a product of a costly process of trial-and-error. To ease this process, we develop ArchExplorer, a visual analysis method for understanding a neural architecture space and summarizing design principles. The key idea behind our method is to make the architecture space explainable by exploiting structural distances between architectures. We formulate the pairwise distance calculation as solving an all-pairs shortest path problem. To improve efficiency, we decompose this problem into a set of single-source shortest path problems. The time complexity is reduced from O(kn2N) to O(knN). Architectures are hierarchically clustered according to the distances between them. A circle-packing-based architecture visualization has been developed to convey both the global relationships between clusters and local neighborhoods of the architectures in each cluster. Two case studies and a post-analysis are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of ArchExplorer in summarizing design principles and selecting better-performing architectures.

Visual analytics for machine learning has recently evolved as one of the most exciting areas in the field of visualization. To better identify which research topics are promising and to learn how to apply relevant techniques in visual analytics, we systematically review 259 papers published in the last ten years together with representative works before 2010. We build a taxonomy, which includes three first-level categories: techniques before model building, techniques during modeling building, and techniques after model building. Each category is further characterized by representative analysis tasks, and each task is exemplified by a set of recent influential works. We also discuss and highlight research challenges and promising potential future research opportunities useful for visual analytics researchers.

One major cause of performance degradation in predictive models is that the test samples are not well covered by the training data. Such not well-represented samples are called OoD samples. In this article, we propose OoDAnalyzer, a visual analysis approach for interactively identifying OoD samples and explaining them in context. Our approach integrates an ensemble OoD detection method and a grid-based visualization. The detection method is improved from deep ensembles by combining more features with algorithms in the same family. To better analyze and understand the OoD samples in context, we have developed a novelkNN-based grid layout algorithm motivated by Hall's theorem. The algorithm approximates the optimal layout and has O(kN2)O(kN2) time complexity, faster than the grid layout algorithm with overall best performance but O(N3)O(N3) time complexity. Quantitative evaluation and case studies were performed on several datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness and usefulness of OoDAnalyzer.

Given a scatterplot with tens of thousands of points or even more, a natural question is which sampling method should be used to create a small but "good" scatterplot for a better abstraction. We present the results of a user study that investigates the influence of different sampling strategies on multi-class scatterplots. The main goal of this study is to understand the capability of sampling methods in preserving the density, outliers, and overall shape of a scatterplot. To this end, we comprehensively review the literature and select seven typical sampling strategies as well as eight representative datasets. We then design four experiments to understand the performance of different strategies in maintaining: 1) region density; 2) class density; 3) outliers; and 4) overall shape in the sampling results. The results show that: 1) random sampling is preferred for preserving region density; 2) blue noise sampling and random sampling have comparable performance with the three multi-class sampling strategies in preserving class density; 3) outlier biased density based sampling, recursive subdivision based sampling, and blue noise sampling perform the best in keeping outliers; and 4) blue noise sampling outperforms the others in maintaining the overall shape of a scatterplot.

A comprehensive and comprehensible summary of existing deep neural networks (DNNs) helps practitioners understand the behaviour and evolution of DNNs, offers insights for architecture optimization, and sheds light on the working mechanisms of DNNs. However, this summary is hard to obtain because of the complexity and diversity of DNN architectures. To address this issue, we develop DNN Genealogy, an interactive visualization tool, to offer a visual summary of representative DNNs and their evolutionary relationships. DNN Genealogy enables users to learn DNNs from multiple aspects, including architecture, performance, and evolutionary relationships. Central to this tool is a systematic analysis and visualization of 66 representative DNNs based on our analysis of 140 papers. A directed acyclic graph is used to illustrate the evolutionary relationships among these DNNs and highlight the representative DNNs. A focus + context visualization is developed to orient users during their exploration. A set of network glyphs is used in the graph to facilitate the understanding and comparing of DNNs in the context of the evolution. Case studies demonstrate that DNN Genealogy provides helpful guidance in understanding, applying, and optimizing DNNs. DNN Genealogy is extensible and will continue to be updated to reflect future advances in DNNs.