ConAn: Measuring and Evaluating User Confidence in Visual Data Analysis Under Uncertainty

Abstract User confidence plays an important role in guided visual data analysis scenarios, especially when uncertainty is involved in the analytical process. However, measuring confidence in practical scenarios remains an open challenge, as previous work relies primarily on self‐reporting methods. In this work, we propose a quantitative approach to measure user confidence—as opposed to trust—in an analytical scenario. We do so by exploiting the respective user interaction provenance graph and examining the impact of guidance using a set of network metrics. We assess the usefulness of our proposed metrics through a user study that correlates results obtained from self‐reported confidence assessments and our metrics—both with and without guidance. The results suggest that our metrics improve the evaluation of user confidence compared to available approaches. In particular, we found a correlation between self‐reported confidence and some of the proposed provenance network metrics. The quantitative results, though, do not show a statistically significant impact of the guidance on user confidence. An additional descriptive analysis suggests that guidance could impact users' confidence and that the qualitative analysis of the provenance network topology can provide a comprehensive view of changes in user confidence. Our results indicate that our proposed metrics and the provenance network graph representation support the evaluation of user confidence and, subsequently, the effective development of guidance in VA.