What s New in Spotfire DXP 1.1 Spotfire Product Management January 2007
Spotfire DXP Version 1.1 This document highlights the new capabilities planned for release in version 1.1 of Spotfire DXP. In this release, we ve made significant enhancements to capturing and utilizing Guided Analyses, added serious statistical muscle to the product in several ways, and included a few select general enhancements. Spotfire Guided Analytics applications are analyses built using Spotfire DXP that are configured by individuals in your organization to reflect your standard operating procedures and best practices. The benefit of authoring and then deploying Spotfire Guided Analytics to other analysts and data consumers is to deliver a rich interactive analysis environment that navigates others to known places of insight and discovery, while simultaneously leaving those same users free to explore the data and pursue their own questions on demand. Version 1.1 of Spotfire DXP delivers on this vision with the addition of Bookmarks and enhancements to text area action links. The new Bookmarking features make it simple to capture known places of insight and discovery. One can easily distribute Bookmarks to downstream users by embedding them in the analysis as action links in text areas, which can also include helpful descriptive text and images to give context and instruction where necessary. One key advantage of using Spotfire DXP is to leverage the analysis expertise in your organization for the benefit of other data consumers. Now in version 1.1, we are providing more powerful statistical tools that will allow your more analytically sophisticated users to configure and deliver reusable analyses to others, analyses that have statistical power yet are also visually intuitive and easily interpretable. There is a new visualization type, the box plot, which is capable of stepping back from the details and looking at the big picture of what s happening in your data, so you won t miss the forest for the trees. There is also a new tool called Data Relationships, which will automatically search for correlated attributes in your data to help you find the cause of the effects you see in your business metrics. A new statistical summary table gives you quick access to the aggregations you need to see. And finally, new aggregations and functions have been added to the product and are available throughout the application for driving visualizations or designing your own custom calculations based on your business rules. The remaining general enhancements to analysis capabilities and workflows are described greater detail later in this document.
Bookmarks Version 1.1 of Spotfire DXP delivers a new dimension to Guided Analytics with the addition of the Bookmark feature. Bookmarks are a simple, effective way to capture the state of your analysis so that it can be recalled later by yourself, a colleague, or anyone else with whom you choose to share your analysis. Spotfire DXP can store as many Bookmarks as you d like to create, and provides you a convenient folder based system for organizing and arranging them. The Bookmark feature allows you to capture any of the following analysis states, or all of them at once: Save and recall your filtering with Bookmarks. Spotfire DXP allows you to filter your data on any of its attributes, and now Bookmarks let you save the all filtering you ve applied so that you can easily recall it later. Preserving the state of your filtering is especially useful for capturing the moment when certain filter conditions reveal interesting trends in the data, or when several filter settings represent a data scenario you need to frequently revisit in the course of your analysis. Save and recall the marked data with Bookmarks. Spotfire DXP allows you to interactively highlight visualization markers of interest by simply clicking on or dragging a box around data points of interest, and now Bookmarks let you save and recall which records have been marked. Keeping in mind that visualizations themselves can be made to illustrate only the marked records, this ability to recall certain marked records is a simple and powerful way to preserve important moments of insight during your analysis. Save and recall the active page with Bookmarks. Spotfire DXP allows you to create several pages of visualizations to help organize and compartmentalize independent analyses or create a linear flow between related analyses, and now Bookmarks let you save and recall a specific page on which to direct focus. Link to Bookmarks from text area Action Links. Spotfire DXP allows you to link to a captured bookmark from a text area. Additional enhancements to the text area Action Links allow you to link directly to analysis pages, control the visibility of control panels, and perform multiple actions with a single link. Bookmarks allow you to easily preserve points of interest in your analysis so you can easily recall them later Bookmarks can be published as action links within Text Areas. Text Areas are freely editable areas that can bring context and instruction to your analyses with the help of rich text formatting and images. Action links are embedded within Text Areas to trigger helpful events in the analysis, such as restoring a specific filter state or opening a URL.
Box Plot Visualization In version 1.1, Spotfire DXP Metrics includes a new type of visualization the box plot, also known as a box-and-whisker plot. The box plot visualization delivers a useful overview of the values in your dataset, the big picture, with a clean and easy to interpret interface. All of what you expect from a standard box plot is here, plus some interesting additions that make this visualization even more powerful. If you are familiar with Spotfire DXP visualizations already, it will be no surprise to learn that several standard features apply to the box plot, such as instant response to data filtering, simple drag-and-drop configuration, and flexibility to create views using many different shapes of underlying data. In Spotfire DXP version 1.1, you can display a standard box plot that illustrates the distribution of your data using certain statistical landmarks that tell you how generally how your data falls across its range. For example, just by looking at the box diagram you can roughly estimate whether your values are evenly distributed or not, or if the values are skewed towards higher or lower values. The box also clearly illustrates outlier data points as outside the box, and determines this using a simple calculation. Upper and lower outliers are defined as those data points which are farther away from the 75 th and 25 th percentile marks (respectively) than 1.5 times the distance between the 25 th and 75 th percentiles. To make it simple to compare data distributions across lots of different data categories, box can be arranged side by side. The Spotfire DXP data engine is flexible enough to create these parallel boxes with many different formats of data. The box plot has a configurable statistics table underneath. For each box you can display aggregations in addition to what s shown in the visualization itself. Include average, standard deviation, or any other available aggregation type to aid your analysis.
Easily find the data of interest based on aggregation. When you have many parallel boxes, you can sort the boxes from left to right based on any of these values displayed in the statistics table underneath the boxes. As you move your mouse pointer over the boxes themselves, you ll notice that it s very easy to mark interesting clusters of data points, such as sets of outliers. When you need a closer look at the distribution of your data, you can configure the visualization to portray an embedded histogram view. For a quick glance to check for bi-modal distributions or other abnormalities, this is a convenient option. Data Relationships Tool In version 1.1, Spotfire DXP Metrics will automatically find correlations in your dataset when you use the Data Relationships tool. Easily configure Spotfire DXP to find the most significant relationships from among your data attributes and give you results that are easy to browse and investigate further.
The Data Relationships tool will automatically find correlated pairs of columns in your data. The Data Relationships tool contains several statistical tests one single simple interface. For categorical comparisons, Data Relationships has the Chi-square test. For numeric comparisons, Data Relationships offers the choice between linear regression and Spearman-R test for parametric and non-parametric analysis respectively. For categorical to numeric comparisons, Data Relationships offers the choice between ANOVA (Analysis of Variance) and Kruskal- Wallis tests for parametric and non-parametric analysis respectively. To use the tool, simply select the test to run and two lists of columns to compare. The tool will automatically calculate the similarity between every selected column pair, and the results are sorted by p-value (significance of relationship). A point-and-click interface allows you to browse the results and investigate the specific relationships the tool has uncovered for deeper interactive analysis. Statistical Summary Table In version 1.1, Spotfire DXP includes this flexible plot which shows aggregated values for columns. This is useful for sifting through many columns of data to find those with the most interesting aggregate characteristics, such as those with the highest average or lowest sum. Or it could be used to display just one helpful aggregation for one column based on what ever records you mark and highlight in other visualizations. Like all the other visualizations in Spotfire DXP, the Summary Table is configurable using drag-and-drop commands, and it also instantly responds to data filtering. The Summary Table in Spotfire DXP can be configured to show convenient summary statistics based on the visualization elements which you click on and mark. The Summary Table in Spotfire DXP can also be used to find columns of interest by sorting based on aggregations. (Shown above, P90 = 90 th percentile)
General Analysis Enhancements Cross Table Export The Cross Table in Spotfire DXP is an efficient way to generate rich data aggregations across several dimensions of data. Now in version 1.1, the data you see in the cross table can be easily exported to generically formatted text file that is compatible with Microsoft Excel and other common editors and spreadsheets. Details on Demand Format The Details on Demand window shows you the detail in your dataset for whichever visual markers you select in the plots. Now in version 1.1, the orientation of that detailed data can be set to always show columns horizontally or vertically, or made automatic based on what type of selection you make for a more easily readable result. Labels for Bar Chart Segments The bar chart is highly configurable to accommodate many different shapes and styles of data, including ways to segment bars into different colors based on your categorical data. Now in version 1.1, individual bar segments can have their own helpful labels to aid analysis. New Aggregations and Functions For Spotfire DXP Metrics customers, version 1.1 includes many powerful new aggregations. Easily access the 10 th and 90 th percentiles in any group of data, and also find out how many outliers or what percentage of data points in a group are outliers (based on the standard statistical box plot definition of outliers). Filter Out Marked Items One of the most powerful features of Spotfire DXP is the ability to interactively filter your data using the Filter Panel while you watch your visualizations change in response. Now in version 1.1, you can also choose to filter out any data you can see in the plots themselves. This gives users more power to add and remove data from view as they see fit in the course of their analyses. Access to Value Formatting Value formatting allows users to define simple rules on how values are displayed in Spotfire DXP, making analysis more readable and even context sensitive using special symbols such as currency markers or measurement units. In version 1.1, it is easier to access and change value formatting settings directly from the filters in the Filter Panel which represent your columns. Spotfire DXP also allows users to calculate new values in their data with custom expressions. Now in version 1.1, these new columns can have their value formatting specified at the time they are calculated.
About Spotfire Inc Spotfire is a leading provider of enterprise business analytics software that helps professionals quickly discover new and actionable insights in information. For thousands of business professionals faced with day-to-day decisions, Spotfire offers a visual and interactive analytics experience that helps them make decisions with speed and confidence. Distinguished by its ease of use and analytic power, Spotfire software rapidly reveals unseen threats and illuminates new opportunities, creating significant economic value. Spotfire s customers include industry leaders among the Global 2000 that have deployed Spotfire analytics to gain an information advantage over their competitors. For more information, visit http://www.spotfire.com.