Enrico Bertini’s blog “Fell in Love with Data” (if you don’t read it, GO NOW it’s fantastic you’ll thank me later) has an article up about the two disciplines Data Mining and Data Visualization. Frequently at odds over methods and practices, he postulates that in fact the two are necessarily interrelated, in fact two sides of the same coin.
I think it’s no mystery that in some way or another visualization and data mining have always been, and still are, somewhat in competition. The way I see it is that from the one hand dataminers see visualization as a too soft discipline, lacking of enough formalism and with the big original sin of having very poor evaluation methods in its toolbox. From the other hand visualizers think data mining is too rigid and narrowly focussed on a plethora of insignificant small deltas to algorithms that nobody will ever understand.
It makes perfect sense once you think of it. The first step in any Data Visualization is to Get and Clean the data: a perfect Data Mining task. When you’re cleaning the data, the easiest way to do so is typically visually: A perfect Data Visualization task.
via Why Visualization Cannot Afford Ignoring Data Mining and Vice Versa — Fell in Love with Data.
Dear Randall, thanks so much for promoting FILWD in such a vigorous way, this is really fantastic! Thanks, Enrico.