LIDA is a powerful AI tool designed to automate data exploration and generate visualizations and infographics using large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and GPT4. It offers a conversational interface that allows users to automatically generate grammar-agnostic visualizations from their data. LIDA consists of four modules: the Summarizer, Goal Explorer, VisGenerator, and Infographer, each serving a specific purpose in the visualization generation process.
The Summarizer module converts data into a concise natural language summary, providing a quick overview of the dataset. The Goal Explorer module enumerates visualization goals based on the available data, helping users identify potential visualizations that can effectively represent their data. The VisGenerator module generates, refines, executes, and filters visualization code, allowing users to create visualizations in various programming languages and visualization grammars, including Python (e.g., Altair, Matplotlib, Seaborn), R, C , and more. Lastly, the Infographer module produces data-faithful stylized graphics using image generation models, enabling the creation of visually appealing infographics.
LIDA is compatible with any programming language or visualization grammar, providing flexibility to users in choosing their preferred tools. It offers operations on existing visualizations, such as visualization explanation, self-evaluation, automatic repair, and recommendation, enhancing the usability and effectiveness of the generated visualizations.
The tool supports various capabilities, including data summarization, automated data exploration, grammar-agnostic visualizations, and infographics generation. By leveraging the language modeling and code-writing capabilities of LLMs, LIDA enables automated visualization generation. It combines LLMs and image generation models (IGMs) in its architecture to address the multi-stage generation problem of visualization creation.
LIDA is an open-source tool that provides a Python API and a hybrid user interface for interactive chart, infographic, and data story generation. While it may have limitations with visualization grammars not well-represented in the LLM’s training dataset and performance variations depending on the choice of visualization libraries and code generation capabilities, LIDA remains a powerful tool for automating the visualization generation process, saving time and effort for data analysts and researchers.