LIDA is a powerful tool that automates data exploration and generates visualizations and infographics using large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and GPT4. It provides a conversational interface for automatic generation of grammar-agnostic visualizations from data. LIDA consists of four modules: the Summarizer, which converts data into a compact natural language summary; the Goal Explorer, which enumerates visualization goals based on the data; the VisGenerator, which generates, refines, executes, and filters visualization code; and the Infographer, which produces data-faithful stylized graphics using image generation models.LIDA is compatible with any programming language or visualization grammar, allowing users to create visualizations in Python (e.g., Altair, Matplotlib, Seaborn), R, C++, and more. It also offers operations on existing visualizations, such as visualization explanation, self-evaluation, automatic repair, and recommendation.The tool supports various capabilities, including data summarization, automated data exploration, grammar-agnostic visualizations, and infographics generation. It leverages the language modeling and code-writing capabilities of LLMs, enabling core automated visualization capabilities. LIDA also provides operations on generated visualizations, such as visualization explanation, self-evaluation, visualization repair, and visualization recommendations.LIDA’s architecture combines LLMs and image generation models (IGMs) to address the multi-stage generation problem of visualization creation. It is open-source and offers a Python API and a hybrid user interface for interactive chart, infographic, and data story generation.While LIDA has 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, it remains a powerful tool for automating the visualization generation process.
