Lost in Translation: The Fundamental Flaws in Star Coordinate Visualizations

The Star Coordinate Plot is a simple and efficient technique for visualizing multidimensional data. Since the proposal of this method in early 2000, several researchers have attempted to address its weakness of tending to project data points towards the origin of the star coordinate space. Despite such attempts, the weakness of Star Coordinate Plot is still not well understood. This paper gives the reasons for the weakness by pointing out two fundamental errors in the design of the original Star Coordinate Plot. We show how these errors result in loss of data points in the process of translating from n -dimensional space to the two-dimensional Star Coordinate space. We then propose the Enhanced Star Coordinate data visualization method to address these issues. Our experimental results show that the proposed method is superior to the original Star Coordinate Plot on several datasets used for evaluations.