Understanding Indirect Causal Relationships in Node-Link Graphs
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Date
2017
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The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Abstract
To find correlations and cause and effect relationships in multivariate data sets is central in many data analysis problems. A common way of representing causal relations among variables is to use node-link diagrams, where nodes depict variables and edges show relationships between them. When performing a causal analysis, analysts may be biased by the position of collected evidences, especially when they are at the top of a list. This is of crucial importance since finding a root cause or a derived effect, and searching for causal chains of inferences are essential analytic tasks when investigating causal relationships. In this paper, we examine whether sequential ordering influences understanding of indirect causal relationships and whether it improves readability of multi-attribute causal diagrams. Moreover, we see how people reason to identify a root cause or a derived effect. The results of our design study show that sequential ordering does not play a crucial role when analyzing causal relationships, but many connections from/to a variable and higher strength/certainty values may influence the process of finding a root cause and a derived effect.
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@article{10.1111:cgf.13198,
journal = {Computer Graphics Forum},
title = {{Understanding Indirect Causal Relationships in Node-Link Graphs}},
author = {Bae, Juhee and Helldin, Tove and Riveiro, Maria},
year = {2017},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.},
ISSN = {1467-8659},
DOI = {10.1111/cgf.13198}
}