Data visualisation and exploration with prior knowledge

Abstract

Visualising data for exploratory analysis is a major challenge in many applications. Visualisation allows scientists to gain insight into the structure and distribution of the data, for example finding common patterns and relationships between samples as well as variables. Typically, visualisation methods like principal component analysis and multi-dimensional scaling are employed. These methods are favoured because of their simplicity, but they cannot cope with missing data and it is difficult to incorporate prior knowledge about properties of the variable space into the analysis; this is particularly important in the high-dimensional, sparse datasets typical in geochemistry. In this paper we show how to utilise a block-structured correlation matrix using a modification of a well known non-linear probabilistic visualisation model, the Generative Topographic Mapping (GTM), which can cope with missing data. The block structure supports direct modelling of strongly correlated variables. We show that including prior structural information it is possible to improve both the data visualisation and the model fit. These benefits are demonstrated on artificial data as well as a real geochemical dataset used for oil exploration, where the proposed modifications improved the missing data imputation results by 3 to 13%.

Divisions: ?? 50811700Jl ??
College of Engineering & Physical Sciences > Systems analytics research institute (SARI)
Aston University (General)
Additional Information: The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com
ISBN: 978-3-642-03969-0
Last Modified: 29 Nov 2023 13:47
Date Deposited: 23 Nov 2010 15:36
Full Text Link: http://www.spri ... 3133k8561714q4/
10.1007/978-3-642-03969-0_13
Related URLs: http://www.scop ... tnerID=8YFLogxK (Scopus URL)
PURE Output Type: Chapter (peer-reviewed)
Published Date: 2009-08-19
Authors: Cornford, Dan
Schroeder, Martin
Nabney, Ian T.

Download

Export / Share Citation


Statistics

Additional statistics for this record