Towards Scalable Visual Data Wrangling Via Direct Manipulation

Data wrangling—the process of cleaning, transforming, and preparing data for analysis—is a well-known bottleneck in data science workflows. Existing tools either rely on manual scripting, which is error-prone and hard to debug, or automate cleaning through opaque black-box pipelines that offer limited control. We present Buckaroo, a scalable visual data wrangling system that restructures data preparation as a direct manipulation task over visualizations. Buckaroo enables users to explore and repair data anomalies—such as missing values, outliers, and type mismatches—by interacting directly with coordinated data visualizations. The system extensibly supports user-defined error detectors and wranglers, tracks provenance for undo/redo, and generates reproducible scripts for downstream tasks. Buckaroo maintains efficient indexing data structures and differential storage to localize anomaly detection and minimize recomputation. To demonstrate the applicability of our model, Buckaroo is integrated with the Hopara pan-and-zoom engine, which enables multi-layered navigation over large datasets without sacrificing interactivity. Through empirical evaluation and an expert review we show that Buckaroo makes visual data wrangling scalable—bridging the gap between visual inspection and programmable repairs.

El Kindi Rezig, Mir Mahathir Mohammad, Nicolas Baret, Ricardo Mayerhofer, Andrew McNutt, and Paul Rosen. Towards Scalable Visual Data Wrangling Via Direct Manipulation. Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR), 2026.

@article{rezig2026cidr,
  title = {Towards Scalable Visual Data Wrangling via Direct Manipulation},
  author = {Rezig, El Kindi and Mohammad, Mir Mahathir and Baret, Nicolas and Mayerhofer,
    Ricardo and McNutt, Andrew and Rosen, Paul},
  journal = {Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR)},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Data wrangling—the process of cleaning, transforming, and preparing data
    for analysis—is a well-known bottleneck in data science workflows. Existing tools either
    rely on manual scripting, which is error-prone and hard to debug, or automate cleaning
    through opaque black-box pipelines that offer limited control. We present Buckaroo, a
    scalable visual data wrangling system that restructures data preparation as a direct
    manipulation task over visualizations. Buckaroo enables users to explore and repair data
    anomalies—such as missing values, outliers, and type mismatches—by interacting directly
    with coordinated data visualizations. The system extensibly supports user-defined error
    detectors and wranglers, tracks provenance for undo/redo, and generates reproducible
    scripts for downstream tasks. Buckaroo maintains efficient indexing data structures and
    differential storage to localize anomaly detection and minimize recomputation. To
    demonstrate the applicability of our model, Buckaroo is integrated with the Hopara
    pan-and-zoom engine, which enables multi-layered navigation over large datasets without
    sacrificing interactivity. Through empirical evaluation and an expert review we show
    that Buckaroo makes visual data wrangling scalable—bridging the gap between visual
    inspection and programmable repairs.}
}