Distortion-Aware Brushing for Reliable Cluster Analysis in Multidimensional Projections

Abstract: Brushing is a common interaction technique in 2D scatterplots, allowing users to select clustered points within a continuous, enclosed region for further analysis or filtering. However, applying conventional brushing to 2D representations of multidimensional (MD) data, i.e., Multidimensional Projections (MDPs), can lead to unreliable cluster analysis due to MDP-induced distortions that inaccurately represent the cluster structure of the original MD data. To alleviate this problem, we introduce a novel brushing technique for MDPs called Distortion-aware brushing. As users perform brushing, Distortion-aware brushing corrects distortions around the currently brushed points by dynamically relocating points in the projection, pulling data points close to the brushed points in MD space while pushing distant ones apart. This dynamic adjustment helps users brush MD clusters more accurately, leading to more reliable cluster analysis. Our user studies with 24 participants show that Distortion-aware brushing significantly outperforms previous brushing techniques for MDPs in accurately separating clusters in the MD space and remains robust against distortions. We further demonstrate the effectiveness of our technique through two use cases: (1) conducting cluster analysis of geospatial data and (2) interactively labeling MD clusters.