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HiPlot: High-dimensional interactive plots made easy

137 points| snippyhollow | 6 years ago |ai.facebook.com

21 comments

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zetaben|6 years ago

Fun fact, in the network and security world, there used to be a tool called picviz that was doing exactly the same kind of things.

https://doc.ubuntu-fr.org/picviz (Sorry I could only find it in French). Seems defunct nowadays.

rckoepke|6 years ago

Reminds me of some charts used by chemical engineers in the age of slide rules. Can anyone help me remember an example?

Cybiote|6 years ago

These are known as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_coordinates and are a pretty old technique. Although the wiki lists process control as one of the major users, their history has them as dormant until revived in their modern form in the 1960s, which doesn't quite match your timeline. Perhaps the discrepancy is resolved by whether parallel axes were used as a equation solving aid versus a visualization aid?

They're also not outdated, you can find them in many libraries, like highcharts here: https://www.highcharts.com/docs/chart-and-series-types/paral...

Excellent technical coverage is: Parallel Coordinates for Visualizing Multi-Dimensional Geometry, from 1987 at https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-4-431-68057-4_...

Wikipedia links to this 1880 chart: https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~3...

chemeng|6 years ago

Don't know if it's what you're referring to, but psychrometric charts are always fun, and any of the thermodynamics charts (Pressure-Enthalpy being an example). The best part? You say the "age of slide rules", but these are still used today.

juliwu|6 years ago

Does anyone know if this can be integrated with tensorboard.

sillysaurusx|6 years ago

Actually yeah, I wrote a script which 1. exports data from tensorboard.dev, then 2. prints it out in csv form that can be dropped into hiplot.

It was ok. Kind of lost interest when I saw the actual result. You can't smooth the data, so often times it's hard to tell what's going on.

Here's the awful script. It's specific to my own naming conventions, so it probably won't work for you. But the same idea would work: just parse the tensorboard data and spit it out as csv. https://gist.github.com/shawwn/b74d6e58da6496e2ade02bab61acc...

I also ran into a bug where multiple different datapoint types were getting merged into one. (It wasn't due to the csv code; the actual CSVs are fine.) I.e. the rows in the csv had a certain column that had a certain value, but in hiplot that column was nowhere to be found.

Here's what it looks like: https://imgur.com/1n1eDXu

I deployed an example here: https://hiplot-subsim-demo.now.sh

Notice that the "run" column shows up in the data, but not in hiplot.

mbostock|6 years ago

Based on a comment buried in the source, this library seems to be heavily based on work by Kai Chang:

http://bl.ocks.org/syntagmatic/3150059

It’s a shame Kai isn’t created in the README, LICENSE, or announcement.

snippyhollow|6 years ago

Thanks for the feedback, we'll fix this.

th0pe|6 years ago

Parallel coordinates as known in d3 world and pointed out by Bostock! :)