Shape It Up: An Empirically Grounded Approach for Designing Shape Palettes.

Shape is commonly used to distinguish between categories in multi-class scatterplots. However, existing guidelines for choosing effective shape palettes rely largely on intuition and do not consider how these needs may change as the number of categories increases. Unlike color, shapes can not be represented by a numerical space, making it difficult to propose general guidelines or design heuristics for using shape effectively.

Causal Priors and Their Influence on Judgements of Causality in Visualized Data.

"Correlation does not imply causation' is a famous mantra in statistical and visual analysis. However, consumers of visualizations often draw causal conclusions when only correlations between variables are shown. In this paper, we investigate factors that contribute to causal relationships users perceive in visualizations.

Beyond Correlation: Incorporating Counterfactual Guidance to Better Support Exploratory Visual Analysis.

Providing effective guidance for users has long been an important and challenging task for efficient exploratory visual analytics, especially when selecting variables for visualization in high-dimensional datasets. Correlation is the most widely applied metric for guidance in statistical and analytical tools, however a reliance on correlation may lead users towards false positives when interpreting causal relations in the data. In this work, inspired by prior insights on the benefits of counterfactual visualization in supporting visual causal inference, we propose a novel, simple, and efficient counterfactual guidance method to enhance causal inference performance in guided exploratory analytics based on insights and concerns gathered from expert interviews.

Using Counterfactuals to Improve Causal Inferences From Visualizations.

Traditional approaches to data visualization have often focused on comparing different subsets of data, and this is reflected in the many techniques developed and evaluated over the years for visual comparison. Similarly, common workflows for exploratory visualization are built upon the idea of users interactively applying various filter and grouping mechanisms in search of new insights. This paradigm has proven effective at helping users identify correlations between variables that can inform thinking and decision-making.