Find distance function, hide model inference

Faced with a large, high-dimensional dataset, many turn to data analysis approaches that they understand less well than the domain of their data. An expert's knowledge can be leveraged into many types of analysis via a domain-specific distance function, but creating such a function is not intuitive to do by hand. We have created a system that shows an initial visualization, adapts to user feedback, and produces a distance function as a result. Specifically, we present a multidimensional scaling (MDS) visualization and an iterative feedback mechanism for a user to affect the distance function that informs the visualization without having to adjust the parameters of the visualization directly. An encouraging experimental result suggests that using this tool, data attributes with useless data are given low importance in the distance function.