Visualizing set concordance with permutation matrices and fan diagrams

Scientific problem solving often involves concordance (or discordance) analysis among the result sets from different approaches. For example, different scientific analysis methods with the same samples often lead to different or even conflicting conclusions. To reach a more judicious conclusion, it is crucial to consider different perspectives by checking concordance among those result sets by different methods. In this paper.. we present an interactive visualization tool called ConSet, where users can effectively examine relationships among multiple sets at once. ConSet provides an overview using an improved permutation matrix to enable users to easily identify relationships among sets with a large number of elements. Not only do we use a standard Venn diagram, we also introduce a new diagram called Fan diagram that allows users to compare two or three sets without any inconsistencies that may exist in Venn diagrams. A qualitative user study was conducted to evaluate how our tool works in comparison with a traditional set visualization tool based on a Venn diagram. We observed that ConSet enabled users to complete more tasks with fewer errors than the traditional interface did and most users preferred ConSet. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.