ParaView/Users Guide/Quantitative Analysis

ParaView 2 was almost entirely a qualitative analysis tool. It was very good at drawing pictures of large scientific data sets so that you could view the data and tell if it looked "right", but it was not easy to use for finding hard quantitative information about the data and verifying that that was the case. The recommended use was to use ParaView to visualize, interact with and subset your data and then export the result into a format that could be imported by a different tool. A major goal of ParaView 3 has been to add quantitative analysis capabilities to turn it into a convenient and comprehensive tool in which you can visualize, interact with and drill all the way down into the data.

These capabilities vary from semi-qualitative ones such as the Ruler source and Cube Axis representation (see Users_Guide_Annotation) to Selection which allows you to define and extract arbitrary subsets of the data based, to the spreadsheet view which presents the data in textual form. Taken together with features like the statistical analysis filters ParaView/Users_Guide/List_of_filters#Descriptive_Statistics, calculator filters, 2D plot and chart views and programmable filters (which give you the ability to run arbitrary code on the server and have access to every data point) these give you the ability to inspect the data at from the highest level view all the way down to the hard numbers.

In this chapter we describe the various tools that ParaView gives you to support quantitative analysis.