Proposal of a Visualization System for a Hierarchical Clustering Algorithm: The Visualize Proximity Matrix

Visual data mining is a new and effective strategy for dealing with the growing phenomenon of information overload. There is an urgent need for effective visual data mining because the growth of data sets from different domains and sources has made exploring, managing and analyzing vast volumes of data increasingly difficult. Identifying location-based trends and anomalies in data from a numeric output is challenging. The outputs of data mining procedures are often quite difficult to interpret. There is no human input to data exploration or direct involvement in the data mining process. Thus, it is difficult to analyze, explore, understand and view the data. In data mining, massive data sets are clustered using an iterative process that includes human input but data mining algorithms can miss some knowledge and observations. In addition, many users cannot take the appropriate action to address problems or opportunities because the huge amounts of data prevent them from staying aware of what is happening in and around their environments. Visual data mining can help in dealing with information overload and it is effective in analyzing large complex data sets. Visual data mining assists users in gaining a deep visual understanding of data. In the information age, users need to study and observe vast amounts of data to acquire important knowledge, and thus the need for visual and interactive analytical tools is particularly pressing. Visual cluster analysis has long utilized shaded similarity matrices, and this study investigated how they can be used in clustering visualization. We focused on proposing an agglomerative hierarchical clustering method. Ensemble cluster visualization is also presented for handling large data sets. This study proposes the adoption of a shaded similarity matrix to visually cluster knowledge discovered using data mining. Using the technology acceptance model as the measuring tool, we questioned respondents to evaluate the visualization prototype. The findings demonstrated that the visualization was effective and easy to use, and satisfied users.