The University of Arizona

Events & News

Colloquium

CategoryLecture
DateThursday, March 28, 2013
Time11:00 am
Concludes12:15 pm
LocationGould-Simpson 906
SpeakerMartin Fink
TitleComputer Science PhD Student
AffiliationUniversity of Wurzburg

Selecting the Aspect Ratio of a Scatter Plot Based on its Delaunay Triangulation

Scatter plots are diagrams that visualize sets of points in two dimensions. They allow users to detect correlations and clusters in the data. Whether a user can accomplish these tasks highly depends on the aspect ratio selected for the plot, i.e., the ratio between the horizontal and the vertical extent of the diagram. We argue that an aspect ratio is good if the Delaunay triangulation of the scatter plot has some nice geometric property, e.g., a large minimum angle or a small total edge length. In order to find an optimum aspect ratio according to a given criterion we present an algorithm that efficiently maintains the Delaunay triangulation of the point set when traversing all aspect ratios.