Data Drilling in Simlytiks

d3VIEW’s Data Visualization Application, Simlytiks, offers a wide-variety of charts with different options for an enhanced data-mining experience. One of these chart features includes data drilling which involves navigating through multiple dimensions of data. A chart with data-drilling capabilities presents data columns in hierarchical layers allowing us to explore different levels within the same container.

Figure 1: Top layers contain information about lower layers. We drill down from top layers to view lower layers and drill back up to review top layers again.

Initial layers show a more broad summary, generally getting more detailed and specific as we navigate down the levels. Though, the layers don’t necessary have to connect in hierarchical format. These charts can showcase columns of data in any order with their drilling capacity as a way to view the correlation between columns or important aspects collectively. And, drill-down paths aren’t necessarily linear as certain paths may connect back to others because of shared data records.

Figure 2: Top levels, 1a and 1b, both share a drilled down level 2b. Second levels, 2a and 2c both share the drilled down level 3c.

Simlytiks has 4 main chart types that drill data up or down: Pivot Table, Vertical Bar Chart, Pie Chart and Tree Map. Let’s take a look at how these charts are drilled. For reference, the order in which we choose our data columns determines the hierarchy of the layers in these charts.

Drill Downs with Pivot Table

Pivot Table uses data-drilling based on its rows and hinge points.

Figure 3: Data added as rows in this Fruits pivot table includes Climate, Fruit and Type with summary columns of Percentages for Location.

Multiple rows can be pivoted out to view or pivoted in to hide. Each added row becomes another level of data to be viewed within the whole or hidden away for summary analysis.