PPCL's Newsletter Archive

The CVE Advantage

What I find powerful about CVE

When I was first exposed to C Visual Explorer, it took me a little while to understand the power. After a couple hours, though, I began to understand. It lets me ask questions about my I would never have considered asking before!

When confronted with a simple system with even dozens of variables, my first reaction would be to reduce the dimensionality. I would attempt to isolate the unit I think is responsible as much as possible, and then pick the five or so variables I know are important. Then I might add another five that I think might be useful in this case. That gives me 10, enough for the rest of the day of analysis. If I don’t know which variables are important, I’ll run some statistics to try and find which are, hoping that the distributions and assumptions of my methods match the data.

With CVE the picture changes. I can dump hundreds of variables in, construct a query on multiple ranges and conditions, and quickly see which units and which variables have some effect. If I want to filter the data to focus on a specific subset of the behaviour I think has a moderate chance of being interesting, I can do that as well, or test a complex hypothesis about the relationship between many variables. I could have done this before, it just would have taken 20 minutes to script a data filter, so I would have had to been really sure about the results before starting. With CVE I can ask it in 30 seconds, making it much more likely that I will ask the fringe, unexpected questions that lead to new understanding.

The power of CVE lies in letting me construct queries and focus levels that answer questions about variable relationships and retroactively apply new operating strategies the past.


Alan Mahoney
Senior Consultant, PPCL

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