Parallel coordinates

Parallel coordinates are a common way

of visualizing and analyzing high-
dimensional datasets.

To show a set of points in an n-

dimensional space, a backdrop is drawn
consisting of n parallel lines, typically
vertical and equally spaced. A point in n-
dimensional space is represented as a
polyline with vertices on the parallel axes;
the position of the vertex on the i-th axis
corresponds to the i-th coordinate of the
point.

This visualization is closely related to time

series visualization, except that it is
applied to data where the axes do not
correspond to points in time, and therefore
do not have a natural order. Therefore,
different axis arrangements may be of
interest.

History
Parallel coordinates were often said to be
invented by Philbert Maurice d'Ocagne in
1885,[1] but even though the words
"Coordonnées parallèles" appear in the
book title this work has nothing to do with
the visualization techniques of the same
name; the book only describes a method
of coordinate transformation. But even
before 1885, parallel coordinates were
used, for example in Henry Gannetts
"General Summary, Showing the Rank of
States, by Ratios, 1880",[2] or afterwards
in Henry Gannetts "Rank of States and
Territories in Population at Each Census,
1790-1890" in 1898. They were
popularised again 87 years later by Alfred Inselberg[3] in 1985 and systematically developed as a
coordinate system starting from 1977. Some important applications are in collision avoidance algorithms for
air traffic control (1987—3 USA patents), data mining (USA patent), computer vision (USA patent),
Optimization, process control, more recently in intrusion detection and elsewhere.

Higher dimensions
On the plane with an xy cartesian coordinate system, adding more dimensions in parallel coordinates (often
abbreviated ||-coords or PCP) involves adding more axes. The value of parallel coordinates is that certain
geometrical properties in high dimensions transform into easily seen 2D patterns. For example, a set of
points on a line in n-space transforms to a set of polylines in parallel coordinates all intersecting at n − 1
points. For n = 2 this yields a point-line duality pointing out why the mathematical foundations of parallel
coordinates are developed in the projective rather than euclidean space. A pair of lines intersects at a unique
point which has two coordinates and, therefore, can correspond to a unique line which is also specified by
two parameters (or two points). By contrast, more than two points are required to specify a curve and also a
pair of curves may not have a unique intersection. Hence by using curves in parallel coordinates instead of
lines, the point line duality is lost together with all the other properties of projective geometry, and the
known nice higher-dimensional patterns corresponding to (hyper)planes, curves, several smooth
(hyper)surfaces, proximities, convexity and recently non-orientability.[4] The goal is to map n-dimensional
relations into 2D patterns. Hence, parallel coordinates is not a point-to-point mapping but rather a nD subset
to 2D subset mapping, there is no loss of information. Note: even a point in nD is not mapped into a point
in 2D, but to a polygonal line—a subset of 2D.

Statistical considerations
When used for statistical data visualisation there are three important
considerations: the order, the rotation, and the scaling of the axes.

The order of the axes is critical for finding features, and in typical
data analysis many reorderings will need to be tried. Some authors
have come up with ordering heuristics which may create
illuminating orderings.[5] Representative sample for parallel
coordinates.
The rotation of the axes is a translation in the parallel coordinates
and if the lines intersected outside the parallel axes it can be
translated between them by rotations. The simplest example of this is rotating the axis by 180 degrees.[6]

Scaling is necessary because the plot is based on interpolation (linear combination) of consecutive pairs of
variables.[6] Therefore, the variables must be in common scale, and there are many scaling methods to be
considered as part of data preparation process that can reveal more informative views.

A smooth parallel coordinate plot is achieved with splines.[7] In the smooth plot, every observation is
mapped into a parametric line (or curve), which is smooth, continuous on the axes, and orthogonal to each
parallel axis. This design emphasizes the quantization level for each data attribute.[6]

Reading
Inselberg (Inselberg 1997) made a full review of how to visually read out parallel coords' relational
patterns.[8] When most lines between two parallel axis are somewhat parallel to each other, it suggests a
positive relationship between these two dimensions. When lines cross in a kind of superposition of X-
shapes, it's a negative relationship. When lines cross randomly or are parallel, it shows there is no particular
relationship.

Limitations
In parallel coordinates, each axis can have at most two neighboring axes (one on the left, and one on the
right). For a d-dimensional data set, at most d-1 relationships can be shown at a time. In time series
visualization, there exists a natural predecessor and successor; therefore in this special case, there exists a
preferred arrangement. However, when the axes do not have a unique order, finding a good axis
arrangement requires the use of heuristics and experimentation. In order to explore more complex
relationships, axes must be reordered.

By arranging the axes in 3-dimensional space (however, still in parallel, like nails in a nail bed), an axis can
have more than two neighbors in a circle around the central attribute, and the arrangement problem gets
easier (for example by using a minimum spanning tree).[9] A prototype of this visualization is available as
extension to the data mining software ELKI. However, the visualization is harder to interpret and interact
with than a linear order.

Software
While there are a large number of papers about parallel coordinates, there are only few notable software
publicly available to convert databases into parallel coordinates graphics.[10] Notable software are ELKI,
GGobi, Mondrian, Orange and ROOT. Libraries include Protovis.js, D3.js provides basic examples.
D3.Parcoords.js (a D3-based library) specifically dedicated to parallel coordinates graphic creation has also
been published. The Python data structure and analysis library Pandas implements parallel coordinates
plotting, using the plotting library matplotlib.[11]

Other visualizations for multivariate data

Radar chart – a visualization with coordinate axes arranged radially
Andrews plot – the Fourier transform of a parallel coordinates graph

References
1. d'Ocagne, Maurice (1885). Coordonnées parallèles et axiales : Méthode de transformation
géométrique et procédé nouveau de calcul graphique déduits de la considération des
coordonnées parallèles (https://archive.org/details/coordonnesparal00ocaggoog). Paris:
Gauthier-Villars.
2. Gannett, Henry. "General Summary Showing the Rank of States by Ratios 1880" (http://ww
w.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~32803~1152181:General-summary,-s
howing-the-rank-o?sort=Pub_Date%2CPub_List_No_InitialSort&qvq=q:List_No%3D%2745
21.152%27%22%2B;sort:Pub_Date%2CPub_List_No_InitialSort;lc:RUMSEY~8~1&mi=0&tr
s=1).
3. Inselberg, Alfred (1985). "The Plane with Parallel Coordinates". Visual Computer. 1 (4): 69–
91. doi:10.1007/BF01898350 (https://doi.org/10.1007%2FBF01898350). S2CID 15933827
(https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:15933827).
4. Inselberg, Alfred (2009). Parallel Coordinates: VISUAL Multidimensional Geometry and its
Applications. Springer. ISBN 978-0387215075.
 5. Yang, Jing; Peng, Wei; Ward, Matthew O.; Rundensteiner, Elke A. (2003). "Interactive
Hierarchical Dimension Ordering Spacing and Filtering for Exploration of High Dimensional
Datasets" (http://davis.wpi.edu/~xmdv/docs/tr0313_osf.pdf) (PDF). IEEE Symposium on
Information Visualization (INFOVIS 2003): 3–4.
6. Moustafa, Rida; Wegman, Edward J. (2006). "Multivariate continuous data – Parallel
Coordinates". In Unwin, A.; Theus, M.; Hofmann, H. (eds.). Graphics of Large Datasets:
Visualizing a Million. Springer. pp. 143–156. ISBN 978-0387329062.
7. Moustafa, Rida; Wegman, Edward J. (2002). "On Some Generalizations of Parallel
Coordinate Plots" (https://web.archive.org/web/20131224111246/http://herakles.zcu.cz/semi
nars/docs/infovis/papers/Moustafa_generalized_parallel_coordinates.pdf) (PDF). Seeing a
Million, A Data Visualization Workshop, Rain Am Lech (Nr.), Germany. Archived from the
original (http://herakles.zcu.cz/seminars/docs/infovis/papers/Moustafa_generalized_parallel
_coordinates.pdf) (PDF) on 2013-12-24.
8. Inselberg, A. (1997), "Multidimensional detective", Information Visualization, 1997.
Proceedings., IEEE Symposium on, pp. 100–107, doi:10.1109/INFVIS.1997.636793 (https://
doi.org/10.1109%2FINFVIS.1997.636793), ISBN 0-8186-8189-6, S2CID 1823293 (https://ap
i.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:1823293)
9. Elke Achtert, Hans-Peter Kriegel, Erich Schubert, Arthur Zimek (2013). "Interactive Data
Mining with 3D-Parallel-Coordinate-Trees". Proceedings of the ACM International
Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD). New York City, NY: 1009–1012.
doi:10.1145/2463676.2463696 (https://doi.org/10.1145%2F2463676.2463696).
ISBN 9781450320375. S2CID 14850709 (https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:148507
09).
10. Kosara, Robert (2010). "Parallel Coordinates" (http://eagereyes.org/techniques/parallel-coor
dinates).
11. Parallel Coordinates in Pandas (https://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/version/0.21.0/visua
lization.html#parallel-coordinates)

Further reading
Heinrich, Julian and Weiskopf, Daniel (2013) State of the Art of Parallel Coordinates (https://
diglib.eg.org/handle/10.2312/conf.EG2013.stars.095-116), Eurographics 2013 - State of the
Art Reports, pp. 95–116
Moustafa, Rida (2011) Parallel coordinate and parallel coordinate density plots, Wiley
Interdisciplinary Reviews: Computational Statistics, Vol 3(2), pp. 134–148.
Weidele, Daniel Karl I. (2019) Conditional Parallel Coordinates (https://doi.org/10.1109/VIS
UAL.2019.8933632), IEEE Visualization Conference (VIS) 2019, pp. 221–225

External links
Alfred Inselberg's Homepage (http://www.cs.tau.ac.il/~aiisreal), with Visual Tutorial, History,
Selected Publications and Applications
An Investigation of Methods for Visualising Highly Multivariate Datasets (http://www.agocg.a
c.uk/reports/visual/casestud/brunsdon/abstract.htm) by C. Brunsdon, A. S. Fotheringham &
M. E. Charlton, University of Newcastle, UK
Using Curves to Enhance Parallel Coordinate Visualisations (http://www.dcs.napier.ac.uk/~
marting/parCoord/GrahamKennedyParallelCurvesIV03.pdf) Archived (https://web.archive.or
g/web/20070315191533/http://www.dcs.napier.ac.uk/~marting/parCoord/GrahamKennedyPa
rallelCurvesIV03.pdf) 2007-03-15 at the Wayback Machine by Martin Graham & Jessie
Kennedy, Napier University, Edinburgh, UK
 Parallel Coordinates (http://eagereyes.org/techniques/parallel-coordinates), a tutorial by
Robert Kosara
Conditional Parallel Coordinates (https://github.com/IBM/conditional-parallel-coordinates) –
Recursive variant of Parallel Coordinates, where a categorical value can expand to reveal
another level of Parallel Coordinates.

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