ABSTRACT
Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) has been an important research topic within the field of statistics, with an emphasis on developing interactive statistics graphics for data analysis. The fundamental goal of EDA methods is to explore unlikely patterns in the data, as well as searching to identify interesting relationships as the analysis proceeds. The interests of both EDA and Geographic Visualization (GVis) research communities have recently been converging, mainly in what concerns the data analysis. The primary focus of GVis research has been the role of highly interactive visualization tools which facilitate identification and interpretation of patterns and relationships in spatio-temporal data (see MacEachren and Kraak (1997) for a recent review and bibliography). GVis builds from a base in cartography, geographic information systems, image analysis, and spatial data analysis with strong ties to related efforts in EDA.
