Are We There Yet? A Review on Existing Perceptual Theory and Experiment Support for Visualization Recommendation Systems

A growing body of research focuses on helping users explore complex datasets faster by automatically suggesting visualization designs of possible interest. However, existing visualization recommendation systems only enumerate, rank, and recommend a small group of visualization designs. Our goal is to understand whether there is enough theoretical and experimental knowledge in current literature to inform visualization recommendation systems to assess the entire visualization design space. Thus, in this paper, we present a literature review comparing and ranking the quality of visualization designs in visual perception and human performance. We structure our review by first defining the visualization design space where visualizations must be compared to recommend effective visualization designs. We then perform the review by using a comprehensive schema to record the theoretical and experimental results of visualization comparison, which can also be used to guide the future construction of visualization recommendation systems. To analyze the literature coverage, we develop an interactive tool that can help explore current literature coverage of visualization comparison and identify gaps efficiently and effectively. Based on our findings, we highlight new opportunities and challenges for the community in working towards a comprehensive visualization ranking for informing visualization recommendation systems.