PowerSet: A Comprehensive Visualization of Set Intersections

When analyzing a large amount of data, analysts often define groups over data elements that share certain properties. Using these groups as the unit of analysis not only reduces the data volume, but also allows detecting various patterns in the data. This involves analyzing intersection relations between these groups, and how the element attributes vary between these intersections. This kind of set-based analysis has various applications in a variety of domains, due to the generic and powerful notion of sets. However, visualizing intersections relations is challenging because their number grows exponentially with the number of sets. We present a novel technique based on Treemaps to provide a comprehensive overview of non-empty intersections in a set system in a scalable way. It enables gaining insight about how elements are distributed across these intersections as well as performing fine-grained analysis to explore and compare their attributes both in overview and in detail. Interaction allows querying and filtering these elements based on their set memberships. We demonstrate how our technique supports various use cases in data exploration and analysis by providing insights into set-based data, beyond the limits of state-of-the-art techniques.