Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Exploring Causal Influences, Eric M. Neufeld, Sonje K. Kristtorn, Qingjuan Guan, Manon Sanscartier, Colin Ware

Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping

Recent data mining techniques exploit patterns of statistical independence in multivariate data to make conjectures about cause/effect relationships. These relationships can be used to construct causal graphs, which are sometimes represented by weighted node-link diagrams, with nodes representing variables and combinations of weighted links and/or nodes showing the strength of causal relationships. We present an interactive visualization for causal graphs (ICGs), inspired in part by the Influence Explorer. The key principles of this visualization are as follows: Variables are represented with vertical bars attached to nodes in a graph. Direct manipulation of variables is achieved by sliding a variable value …