Visual analytics
area of research
Visual analytics is a multidisciplinary science and technology field that emerged from information visualization and scientific visualization. It focuses on how analytical reasoning can be facilitated by interactive visual interfaces.
Overview
Visual analytics is "the science of analytical reasoning facilitated by interactive visual interfaces." It can address problems whose size, complexity, and need for closely coupled human and machine analysis may make them otherwise intractable. Visual analytics advances scientific and technological development across multiple domains, including analytical reasoning, human–computer interaction, data transformations, visual representation for computation and analysis, analytic reporting, and the transition of new technologies into practice. As a research agenda, visual analytics brings together several scientific and technical communities from computer science, information visualization, cognitive and perceptual sciences, interactive design, graphic design, and social sciences.
Visual analytics integrates new computational and theory-based tools with innovative interactive techniques and visual representations to enable human-information discourse. The design of the tools and techniques is based on cognitive, design, and perceptual principles. This science of analytical reasoning provides the reasoning framework upon which one can build both strategic and tactical visual analytics technologies for threat analysis, prevention, and response. Analytical reasoning is central to the analyst's task of applying human judgments to reach conclusions from a combination of evidence and assumptions.
Visual analytics has some overlapping goals and techniques with information visualization and scientific visualization.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2528440. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Visual analytics” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.