Visual Data Mining: From Visualization to Visual Information Mining

Data mining has been fruitfully used in many of domains, including marketing, medicine, finance, engineering and bioinformatics. There still are, however, a number of factors that militate against the widespread adoption and use of this new technology. This is mainly due to the fact that the results of many data mining techniques are often difficult to understand. For example, the results of a data mining effort producing 300 pages of rules will be difficult to analyze. The visual representation of the knowledge embedded in such rules will help to heighten the comprehensibility of the results. The visualization of the data itself, as well as the data mining process should go a long way towards increasing the user's understanding of and faith in the data mining process.