SpotLight: Visual Insight Recommendation

Visualization recommendation systems make understanding data more accessible to users of all skill levels by automatically generating visualizations for users to explore. However, most existing visualization recommendation systems focus on ranking all possible visualizations based on the attributes or encodings, which makes it difficult to find the most relevant insights. We therefore introduce a novel class of insight-based visualization recommendation systems that automatically rank and recommend groups of related insights as well as the most important insights within each group. Our approach combines results from different learning-based methods to discover insights automatically and generalizes to a variety of attribute types (e.g., categorical, numerical, and temporal), including non-trivial combinations of these attribute types. To demonstrate the utility of this approach, we implemented a insight-centric visualization recommendation system, SpotLight, and conducted a user study with twelve participants, which showed that users are able to quickly find and understand relevant insights in unfamiliar data.