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At the core of successful visual analytics systems are computational techniques that transform data into concise, human comprehensible visual representations. The general process often requires multiple transformation steps before a final visual representation is generated. This article characterizes the complex raw data to be analyzed and then describes two different sets of transformations and representations. The first set transforms the raw data into more concise representations that improve the performance of sophisticated computational methods. The second transforms internal representations into visual representations that provide the most benefit to an interactive user. The end result is a computing system that enhances an end user's analytic process with effective visual representations and interactive techniques. While progress has been made on improving data transformations and representations, there is substantial room for improvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fundamental problem that we face is that a variety of large-scale problems in security, public safety, energy, ecology, health care and basic science all require that we process and understand increasingly vast amounts and variety of data. There is a growing impedance mismatch between data size/complexity and the human ability to understand and interact with data. Visual analytic tools are intended to help reduce that impedance mismatch by using analytic tools to reduce the amount of data that must be viewed, and visualization tools to help understand the patterns and relationships in the reduced data. But visual analytic tools must address a variety of scalability issues if they are to succeed. In this paper, we characterize the scalability and complexity issues in visual analytics. We discuss some highlights on progress that has been made in the past 5 years, as well as key areas where more progress is needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]