Clustering, the process of grouping together similar items into distinct partitions, is a common type of unsupervised machine learning that can be useful for summarizing and aggregating complex multi-dimensional data. However, data can be clustered in many ways, and there exist a large body of algorithms designed to reveal different patterns. While having access to a wide variety of algorithms is helpful, in practice, it is quite difficult for data scientists to choose and parameterize algorithms to get the clustering results relevant for their dataset and analytical tasks. To alleviate this problem, we built Clustervision, a visual analytics tool that helps ensure data scientists find the right clustering among the large amount of techniques and parameters available. Our system clusters data using a variety of clustering techniques and parameters and then ranks clustering results utilizing five quality metrics. In addition, users can guide the system to produce more relevant results by providing task-relevant constraints on the data. Our visual user interface allows users to find high quality clustering results, explore the clusters using several coordinated visualization techniques, and select the cluster result that best suits their task. We demonstrate this novel approach using a case study with a team of researchers in the medical domain and showcase that our system empowers users to choose an effective representation of their complex data.

Biological interpretation and understanding of machine learning based predictive models are highly desirable in healthcare analytics. Predicting Adverse Drug Reactions (ADRs) is extremely important for safe and precision medicine. There are various machine learning based approaches to predict adverse reactions for drugs. These models, though effective, lack biological interpretation and are treated as black-boxes. We propose DrugPathSeeker, a novel interactive user interface that integrates the machine learning model, database query API, statistical analysis, and visualization for exploring and understanding of the association between drugs and ADRs. The proposed UI can take a query drug, and provide a visual interface designed to support exploration of the predictions from the machine learning model for further understanding and interpretation. DrugPathSeeker uses a machine learning model, Small Molecular Risk Profiler, to make ADR predictions for a given drug. The visualization uses Sankey type flow diagrams for highlighting the relation between the drugs and ADRs. The main goal of Drug-PathSeeker is to mine the gene-pathways from public databases and analyze them in a visual manner to generate a biological hypothesis. DrugPathSeeker's effectiveness is demonstrated with two use cases: mechanisms of action for carbamazepine-induced dystonia, and fluorometholone-induced diabetes mellitus.