Exploratory Analysis of Graphical Summaries of Scenarios

• Activity Number: 111
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, August 9, 2004 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistical Graphics
• Author(s): Paul Whitney*+ and Olga A. Kuchar and George Chin and Mary Powers and Katherine E. Johnson and James M. Sloughter
• Companies: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and University of Washington
• Keywords: social networks ; graphs ; exploratory data analysis

Abstract

Events, organizations, and scenarios are often represented as highly labeled, free-form graphs; these graphs are composed of free-form text, structured text, and icons to create a visual summary. Such graphical depictions are increasingly common in the intelligence and law enforcement fields. These graphs often serve as an index or detailed summary for analysts who construct them, and also function as presentation. While software exists to assist in the construction, manipulation, and searching of these graphs, there is an increasing need for data analytic tools associated with graph representations. Methodology was developed to represent the graph summaries and to enable the exploratory analysis of large individual and/or collection of such summaries. Our methodology is based on the following strategy: (1) constructing a numeric vector representation of the objects of interest; (2) apply data analytic methodology on the numeric vectors; and (3) map the results of the data analysis back onto the data and problem space. The numeric representation is based on both graph-theory and text-analysis concepts. Examples of scenario retrieval and summary are presented.