An empirical study of counterfactual visualization to support visual causal inference

Counterfactuals – expressing what might have been true under different circumstances – have been widely applied in statistics and machine learning to help understand causal relationships. More recently, counterfactuals have begun to emerge as a technique being applied within visualization research. However, it remains unclear to what extent counterfactuals can aid with visual data communication. In this paper, we primarily focus on assessing the quality of users’ understanding of data when provided with counterfactual visualizations. We propose a preliminary model of causality comprehension by connecting theories from causal inference and visual data communication. Leveraging this model, we conducted an empirical study to explore how counterfactuals can improve users’ understanding of data in static visualizations. Our results indicate that visualizing counterfactuals had a positive impact on participants’ interpretations of causal relations within datasets. These results motivate a discussion of how to more effectively incorporate counterfactuals into data visualizations.