On visualization techniques for solar data mining

Large-scale data mining is often aided with graphic visualizations to facilitate a better understanding of the data and results. This is especially true for visual data and highly detailed data too complex to be easily understood in raw forms. In this work, we present several of our recent interdisciplinary works in data mining solar image repositories and discuss the over-arching need for effective visualizations of data, metadata, and results along the way. First, we explain the complex characteristics and overwhelming abundance of image data being produced by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). Then we discuss the wide scope of solar data mining and highlight visual results from work in data labeling, classification, and clustering. Lastly, we present an overview of the first-ever Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) system for solar images, and conclude with a brief look at the direction of our future research.