Visual Analytics

What Does Visual Analytics Mean?

Visual analytics are a group of measuring systems and processes that combine analytical reasoning with information visualization.

Techopedia Explains Visual Analytics

Visual analytics is based on the premise that visualization is used as a tool to help with analytics.

Although the idea of visual analytics is a broad one, this discipline can have some ambiguity.Generally, what makes visual analytics unique is that the information being visualized involves statistical work or data mining, or other types of analytics work.

For instance, visualization of data that is inherent in a natural system or gets drawn up by human hands could be described as information visualization. On the other hand, a visual interface that simply displays the results of analytics algorithms would be described as visual analytics.

A visual analytics system will often use a specific software dashboard to present analytics results visually. For example, the dashboard screens might have various engines involving visual graphs, pie charts or infographics tools, where, after computational algorithms work, the results pop up on the screen.

The visual analytics interface makes it easy for a human user to understand the results, at which time that human user can make changes that further direct the computer’s algorithmic process.

Part of the innovative idea of visual analytics is this interplay between humans and computers, where with the combination of raw algorithmic strength and adept visualization, each one strengthens the work of the other in refining data sets for various goals and objectives.