Exploring Hierarchical Rule Systems in Parallel Coordinates

Rule systems have failed to attract much interest in large data analysis problems because they tend to be too simplistic to be useful or consist of too many rules for human interpretation. We recently presented a method that constructs a hierarchical rule system, with only a small number of rules at each level of the hierarchy. Lower levels in this hierarchy focus on outliers or areas of the feature space where only weak evidence for a rule was found in the data. Rules further up, at higher levels of the hierarchy, describe increasingly general and strongly supported aspects of the data. In this paper we show how a connected set of parallel coordinate displays can be used to visually explore this hierarchy of rule systems and allows an intuitive mechanism to zoom in and out of the underlying model.