Visualizations depicting probabilities and uncertainty are used everywhere from medical risk communication to machine learning, yet these probabilistic visualizations are difficult to specify, prone to error, and their designs are cumbersome to explore. We propose a Probabilistic Grammar of Graphics (PGoG), an extension to Wilkinson's original framework. Inspired by the success of probabilistic programming languages, PGoG makes probability expressions, such as P(A|B), a first-class citizen in the language. PGoG abstractions also reflect the distinction between probability and frequency framing, a concept from the uncertainty communication literature. It is expressive, encompassing product plots, density plots, icon arrays, and dotplots, among other visualizations. Its coherent syntax ensures correctness (that the proportions of visual elements and their spatial placement reflect the underlying probability distribution) and reduces edit distance between probabilistic visualization specifications, potentially supporting more design exploration. We provide a proof-of-concept implementation of PGoG in R.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376466
When presenting visualizations of experimental results, scientists often choose to display either inferential uncertainty (e.g., uncertainty in the estimate of a population mean) or outcome uncertainty (e.g., variation of outcomes around that mean) about their estimates. How does this choice impact readers' beliefs about the size of treatment effects? We investigate this question in two experiments comparing 95% confidence intervals (means and standard errors) to 95% prediction intervals (means and standard deviations). The first experiment finds that participants are willing to pay more for and overestimate the effect of a treatment when shown confidence intervals relative to prediction intervals. The second experiment evaluates how alternative visualizations compare to standard visualizations for different effect sizes. We find that axis rescaling reduces error, but not as well as prediction intervals or animated hypothetical outcome plots (HOPs), and that depicting inferential uncertainty causes participants to underestimate variability in individual outcomes.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376454
Bayesian statistical analysis is steadily growing in popularity and use. Choosing priors is an integral part of Bayesian inference. While there exist extensive normative recommendations for prior setting, little is known about how priors are chosen in practice. We conducted a survey (N = 50) and interviews (N = 9) where we used interactive visualizations to elicit prior distributions from researchers experienced withBayesian statistics and asked them for rationales for those priors. We found that participants' experience and philosophy influence how much and what information they are willing to incorporate into their priors, manifesting as different levels of informativeness and skepticism. We also identified three broad strategies participants use to set their priors: centrality matching, interval matching, and visual mass allocation. We discovered that participants' understanding of the notion of"weakly informative priors"—a commonly-recommended normative approach to prior setting—manifests very differently across participants. Our results have implications both for how to develop prior setting recommendations and how to design tools to elicit priors in Bayesian analysis.
Narrative visualization is a popular style of data-driven storytelling. Authors use this medium to engage viewers with complex and sometimes controversial issues. A challenge for authors is to not only deliver new information, but to also overcome people's biases and misconceptions. We study how people adjust their attitudes toward (or away from) a message experienced through a narrative visualization. In a mixed-methods analysis, we investigate whether eliciting participants' prior beliefs, and visualizing those beliefs alongside actual data, can increase narrative persuasiveness. We find that incorporating priors does not significantly affect attitudinal change. However, participants who externalized their beliefs expressed greater surprise at the data. Their comments also indicated a greater likelihood of acquiring new information, despite the minimal change in attitude. Our results also extend prior findings, showing that visualizations are more persuasive than equivalent textual data representations for exposing contentious issues. We discuss the implications and outline future research directions.
This paper presents an authoring environment for augmenting static visualizations with virtual content in augmented reality.Augmenting static visualizations can leverage the best of both physical and digital worlds, but its creation currently involves different tools and devices, without any means to explicitly design and debug both static and virtual content simultaneously. To address these issues, we design an environment that seamlessly integrates all steps of a design and deployment workflow through its main features: i) an extension to Vega, ii) a preview, and iii) debug hints that facilitate valid combinations of static and augmented content. We inform our design through a design space with four ways to augment static visualizations. We demonstrate the expressiveness of our tool through examples, including books, posters, projections, wall-sized visualizations. A user study shows high user satisfaction of our environment and confirms that participants can create augmented visualizations in an average of 4.63 minutes.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376436