Solving Intelligence Analysis Problems using Biclusters

Analysts must filter through an ever-growing amount of data to obtain information relevant to their investigations. Looking at every piece of information individually is in many cases not feasible; there is hence a growing need for new filtering tools and techniques to improve the analyst process with large datasets. We present MineVis — an analytics system that integrates biclustering algorithms and visual analytics tools in one seamless environment. The combination of biclusters and visual data glyphs in a visual analytics spatial environment enables a novel type of filtering. This design allows for rapid exploration and navigation across connected documents. Through a user study we conclude that our system has the potential to help analysts filter data by allowing them to i) form hypotheses before reading documents and subsequently ii) validating them by reading a reduced and focused set of documents.