2.7 Bibliographic Notes

Methods for descriptive data summarization have been studied in the statistics literature long before the onset of computers. Good summaries of statistical descriptive data mining methods include Freedman, Pisani, and Purves [FPP07] and Devore [Dev95]. For statistics-based visualization of data using boxplots, quantile plots, quantile–quantile plots, scatter plots, and loess curves, see Cleveland [Cle93].

Pioneering work on data visualization techniques is described in The Visual Display of Quantitative Information [Tuf83], Envisioning Information [Tuf90], and Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative [Tuf97], all by Tufte, in addition to Graphics and Graphic Information Processing by Bertin [Ber81], Visualizing Data by Cleveland [Cle93], and Information Visualization in Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery edited by Fayyad, Grinstein, and Wierse [FGW01].

Major conferences and symposiums on visualization include ACM Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), Visualization, and the International Symposium on Information Visualization. Research on visualization is also published in Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, and IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications.

Many graphical user interfaces and visualization tools have been developed and can be found in various data mining products. Several books on data mining (e.g., Data Mining Solutions by Westphal and Blaxton [WB98]) present many good examples and visual snapshots. For a survey of visualization techniques, see “Visual techniques for exploring databases” by Keim [Kei97].

Similarity and distance measures among various variables have been introduced in many textbooks that study cluster analysis, including Hartigan [Har75]; Jain and Dubes [JD88]; Kaufman and Rousseeuw [KR90]; and Arabie, Hubert, and de Soete [AHS96]. Methods for combining attributes of different types into a single dissimilarity matrix were introduced by Kaufman and Rousseeuw [KR90].