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Record W2969737323 · doi:10.1109/tvcg.2019.2934399

Illusion of Causality in Visualized Data

2019· article· en· W2969737323 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics · 2019
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldComputer Science
TopicData Visualization and Analytics
Canadian institutionsKellogg's (Canada)
Fundersnot available
KeywordsCausality (physics)VisualizationComputer scienceCausationIllusionBar chartCausal reasoningInterpretation (philosophy)Data visualizationCognitionCognitive psychologyPsychologyArtificial intelligenceStatisticsMathematics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Students who eat breakfast more frequently tend to have a higher grade point average. From this data, many people might confidently state that a before-school breakfast program would lead to higher grades. This is a reasoning error, because correlation does not necessarily indicate causation - X and Y can be correlated without one directly causing the other. While this error is pervasive, its prevalence might be amplified or mitigated by the way that the data is presented to a viewer. Across three crowdsourced experiments, we examined whether how simple data relations are presented would mitigate this reasoning error. The first experiment tested examples similar to the breakfast-GPA relation, varying in the plausibility of the causal link. We asked participants to rate their level of agreement that the relation was correlated, which they rated appropriately as high. However, participants also expressed high agreement with a causal interpretation of the data. Levels of support for the causal interpretation were not equally strong across visualization types: causality ratings were highest for text descriptions and bar graphs, but weaker for scatter plots. But is this effect driven by bar graphs aggregating data into two groups or by the visual encoding type? We isolated data aggregation versus visual encoding type and examined their individual effect on perceived causality. Overall, different visualization designs afford different cognitive reasoning affordances across the same data. High levels of data aggregation by graphs tend to be associated with higher perceived causality in data. Participants perceived line and dot visual encodings as more causal than bar encodings. Our results demonstrate how some visualization designs trigger stronger causal links while choosing others can help mitigate unwarranted perceptions of causality.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Simulation or modeling · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.994
Threshold uncertainty score0.706

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.001
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.037
GPT teacher head0.329
Teacher spread0.291 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it