UpSet
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UpSet: Visualization of Intersecting Sets

UpSet is an interactive, web based visualization technique designed to analyze set-based data. UpSet visualizes both, set intersections and their properties, and the items (elements) in the dataset.

About

Understanding relationships between sets is an important analysis task that has received widespread attention in the visualization community. The major challenge in this context is the combinatorial explosion of the number of set intersections if the number of sets exceeds a trivial threshold. To address this, we introduce UpSet, a novel visualization technique for the quantitative analysis of sets, their intersections, and aggregates of intersections.

UpSet is focused on creating task-driven aggregates, communicating the size and properties of aggregates and intersections, and a duality between the visualization of the elements in a dataset and their set membership. UpSet visualizes set intersections in a matrix layout and introduces aggregates based on groupings and queries. The matrix layout enables the effective representation of associated data, such as the number of elements in the aggregates and intersections, as well as additional summary statistics derived from subset or element attributes.

Sorting according to various measures enables a task-driven analysis of relevant intersections and aggregates. The elements represented in the sets and their associated attributes are visualized in a separate view. Queries based on containment in specific intersections, aggregates or driven by attribute filters are propagated between both views. UpSet also introduces several advanced visual encodings and interaction methods to overcome the problems of varying scales and to address scalability.

Paper

Alexander Lex, Nils Gehlenborg, Hendrik Strobelt, Romain Vuillemot, and Hanspeter Pfister
UpSet: Visualization of Intersecting Sets
To appear in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (InfoVis '14).

Commentary

Alexander Lex, Nils Gehlenborg
Points of view: Sets and intersections
Nature Methods, vol. 11, no. 8, pp. 779, 2014.

Videos

UpSet in 30 Seconds

A very short introduction to UpSet.

Intro & UpSet Demo Video

A five minute demonstration of the UpSet concept and its features.

Contact

You can contact us, via alex@seas.harvard.edu. If you found a bug, you can directly report it at GitHub project site.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I upload my own dataset to analyze in UpSet?
Yes, you can use upset with data that can be accessed over the Internet. Go here to learn hwo to do it.

Can I download UpSet and use it locally for my confidential data?
Yes, you can download upset from the source code repository, which also provides some instructions on local deployment.

Do you provide documentation for UpSet?
Yes, through our Wiki. Right now it only covers data import, but more will follow soon. Don't forget to watch the videos! They give you a good idea on how things are done.

Which Browsers are supported?
We currently test only on the latest version of Google Chrome. Other recent browsers might work too.

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank our collaborators, Anne Mai Wassermann, Soohyun Lee, Michele Coscia and Frank Neffke for their time and expertise. We also thank Bilal Alsallakh, Silvia Miksch and the whole Radial Sets team for providing feedback and datasets.

Explore other set visualization techniques at http://setviz.net/

UpSet is supported in part by the Austrian Science Fund (J 3437-N15), the Air Force Research Laboratory and DARPA grant FA8750-12-C-0300 and the United States NIH/National Human Genome Research Institute (K99 HG007583).

UpSet uses the D3 library for visualization. This website is based on Nils Gehlenborg's and Samuel Gratzl's design.

The music in the preview video is by Roulet, "I Can Make This", licensed under creative commons.

Team

Resources