Dynamic Tree Colors: Adaptive Discriminable Hierarchies with Minimum Instability

Hierarchical color maps can support users in the analysis of hierarchical data. For large hierarchies, dynamic color maps can improve discriminability upon user interactions, but the incremental color changes may cause users to lose their orientation in the data set. To address this challenge, we present Dynamic Tree Colors, a dynamic hierarchical color map that can be configured to a suitable tradeoff between discriminability and color stability. We also define quality metrics for both criteria and investigate our algorithm’s performance with respect to these metrics as well as a user study with 18 participants. Our results indicate that Dynamic Tree Colors yields good results in a wide range of application scenarios, but it does not achieve the performance of the state-of-the-art algorithm Cuttlefish in the specific scenario that algorithm was designed for.