Enhancing scatter-plots with start-plots for visualising multi-dimensional data

Scatter-plot visualisation techniques are useful for analysing the correlations of variables on the axes as well as revealing patterns or abnormality in multidimensional data sets. However, Scatter-plot techniques have a drawback that they are not effective in showing a high number of dimensions where each plot in two-dimensional space can show a pair-wise of two variables on the X- and Y-axis. Star-plots are suitable for showing small data set with a low number of dimensions thank to the compactness in the visualisation. This paper proposes a hybrid technique that integrates Start-plots with Scatter-plots in the visualisation to enable the greater capability of scatter-plots in showing more information on each individual Star-plot. Our visualisation provides both overall views of mapping variables on multiple Scatter-plots whilst we also utilise Star-plots for showing the selected attributes on individual items for better comparison among and within variables. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of this hybrid method through case studies on various data sets.