Visualization tools

I recently took a course on Big Data and found out a new software for visualisations. I found out about this software in a guest lecture where 24 hour hackathon in kaiser permanente was discussed and how they used this software for all the visualisations and won the hackathon.

Tableau Software is based on a technology used in Stanford to drag and drop to visualize data. The software helps data scientists to visualize data in several formats and has supporting tools. It is the easiest visualization tool that I have used so far and the visualizations come out amazing. The data just needs to be copy pasted to the bin, and the software automatically assigns measures and dimensions values. We just need to drag drop column and row names to convert the data in charts, graphs and maps.

It is so easy to use that any person who knows to use Excel to make charts will immediately start loving this software. There are other visualization tools like Many Eyes, Google Analytics, but by far, Tableau software public is the software that I loved the most. A sample visualization is shown below.

There are other tools like Many Eyes, StatPlanet. While ManyEyes is public, we need to upload the datasets to public to visualize. StatPlanet helps to create interactive maps which is a great tool for visualizing weather data, geographical data. StatPlanet has lot of tools like StatTrends, StatWorld where each tool is used for different visualizations.

Visualization of data is something that I enjoyed the most past few months and these tools definitely are a reason to it.

References:
http://www.tableausoftware.com/products/desktop#visualize-data-like-never-before
http://www.statsilk.com/software/statplanet