UpSet: Visualization of Intersecting Sets

By Alexander Lex, Nils Gehlenborg, Hendrik Strobelt, Romain Vuillemot, Hanspeter Pfister. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 2014

1,962 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Understanding relationships between sets is an important analysis task that has received widespread attention in the visualization community. The major challenge in this context is the combinatorial explosion of the number of set intersections if the number of sets exceeds a trivial threshold. In this paper we introduce UpSet, a novel visualization technique for the quantitative analysis of sets, their intersections, and aggregates of intersections. UpSet is focused on creating task-driven aggregates, communicating the size and properties of aggregates and intersections, and a duality between the visualization of the elements in a dataset and their set membership. UpSet visualizes set intersections in a matrix layout and introduces aggregates based on groupings and queries. The matrix layout enables the effective representation of associated data, such as the number of elements in the aggregates and intersections, as well as additional summary statistics derived from subset or element attributes. Sorting according to various measures enables a task-driven analysis of relevant intersections and aggregates. The elements represented in the sets and their associated attributes are visualized in a separate view. Queries based on containment in specific intersections, aggregates or driven by attribute filters are propagated between both views. We also introduce several advanced visual encodings and interaction methods to overcome the problems of varying scales and to address scalability. UpSet is web-based and open source. We demonstrate its general utility in multiple use cases from various domains.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Food Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/92f36007d016049f7bf3e47a804e3a99093bcada

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Citations in the corpus

High-resolution TADs reveal DNA sequences underlying genome organization in flies (2017, positive): “The intersections were plotted using UpSetR (Lex et al. 2014).”
Dark Patterns after the GDPR: Scraping Consent Pop-ups and Demonstrating their Influence (2020, background): “UpSet diagram [16, 36] of sites by adherence to three core conditions of EU law.”
Intervene: a tool for intersection and visualization of multiple gene or genomic region sets (2017, methodology): “An alternative approach, the UpSet plots, was introduced to depict the intersection of more than three sets [3].”
ggVennDiagram: An Intuitive, Easy-to-Use, and Highly Customizable R Package to Generate Venn Diagram (2021, methodology): “The UpSet plot is a state-of-the-art visualization technique for the quantitative analysis of sets (Lex et al., 2014), and it supports an unlimited number of sets.”
Complex heatmap visualization (2022, methodology): “The UpSet plot [31] provides a more efficient way to visualize intersections in a large number of sets compared to the traditional approach, that is, the Venn Diagram.”
LinDA: linear models for differential abundance analysis of microbiome compositional data (2021, methodology): “25) and used UpSet plot [34] to show the overlap at the target FDR of 0.”