Pointwise information guided visual analysis of time-varying multi-fields

Abstract

Identification of salient features from a time-varying multivariate system plays an important role in scientific data understanding. In this work, we present a unified analysis framework based on mutual information and two of its decomposition: specific and pointwise mutual information to quantify the amount of information content between different value combinations from multiple variables over time. The pointwise mutual information (PMI), computed for each value combination, is used to construct informative scalar fields, which allow close examination of combined and complementary information possessed by multiple variables. Since PMI gives us a way of quantifying information shared among all combinations of scalar values for multiple variables, it is used to identify salient isovalue tuples. Visualization of isosurfaces on those selected tuples depicts combined or complementary relationships in the data. For intuitive interaction with the data, an interactive interface is designed based on the proposed information-theoretic measures. Finally, successful application of the proposed method on two time-varying data sets demonstrates the efficacy of the system.