Recent progress and trends in predictive visual analytics

A wide variety of predictive analytics techniques have been developed in statistics, machine learning and data mining; however, many of these algorithms take a black-box approach in which data is input and future predictions are output with no insight into what goes on during the process. Unfortunately, such a closed system approach often leaves little room for injecting domain expertise and can result in frustration from analysts when results seem spurious or confusing. In order to allow for more human-centric approaches, the visualization community has begun developing methods to enable users to incorporate expert knowledge into the prediction process at all stages, including data cleaning, feature selection, model building and model validation. This paper surveys current progress and trends in predictive visual analytics, identifies the common framework in which predictive visual analytics systems operate, and develops a summarization of the predictive analytics workflow.