Let Auto Insights Suggest Visualizations for a Dataset

This topic describes what you need to know to use Auto Insights.

What Are Auto Insights?

Auto insights are visualizations that Oracle Analytics generates for you based on your dataset's measures, attributes, and relationships. You can add these generated visualizations to your workbook.

The Auto Insights feature does the work of a data scientist for you and helps you understand and analyze your data more completely.

Each auto insight visualization contains a natural language summary that explains the relationship between attributes and measures, and highlights other points of interest.
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Description of the illustration insights.png

You can customize the insights results by specifying the dataset columns you want Oracle Analytics to analyze and by specifying the visualization types you want Auto Insights to display.

When you add a dataset to a workbook, Oracle Analytics profiles the dataset to find the insights in your data. After you add a dataset to your workbook, you can open the Auto Insights panel to view the data insights that Oracle Analytics found.

Oracle Analytics generates insights for datasets containing up to 300 million cells, where the number of cells is calculated as the number of rows multiplied by the number of columns.

Oracle Analytics generates insights for most dataset types. Exceptions include:
  • Multidimensional sources such as Essbase, Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service, and Analytic Views.
  • Datasets based on non-Oracle databases.

Locate and Choose Visualizations Generated by Auto Insights

Review the visualizations generated by Auto Insights to determine if you want to add any of the insights to your workbook.

When you create or open a workbook, the Auto Insights icon is white while Oracle Analytics reviews the dataset's measures, attributes, and relationships between these data elements to determine insights. The Auto Insights icon turns yellow after Oracle Analytics completes generating insights and displays the suggested visualizations and their summaries.

To generate insights for a dataset, Auto Insights must be enabled for the dataset. See Turn Auto Insights On or Off for a Dataset.

  1. Create or open a workbook and display the Visualize panel.
  2. On the toolbar, click Auto Insights Auto Insight icon in yellow.
  3. In the Auto Insights panel, hover over a visualization that you want to include in the workbook, and click + to add it to the workbook canvas.
  4. Optional: In the visualization's Grammar Panel, click Properties, and in the Title Tooltip field, inspect or update the visualization's summary.
    Title Tooltip field

  5. Click Save.

Select Which Columns Auto Insights Profiles

You can customize insights by selecting data columns to include and exclude from the generated insights. For example, you might exclude data columns that you don't want to visualize.

Specifying which columns Auto Insights profiles enables you to focus on the most useful insights.
When you select the columns you want to include or excluded and click Apply, your selections are applied to the generated insights. Oracle Analytics saves and applies your column selections when you close and re-open the workbook. The column selections are user-specific. So your selections display for you and not for other users.
  1. Create or open a workbook and display the Visualize panel.
  2. On the toolbar, click Auto Insights Auto Insight icon in yellow.
  3. Click Insight Settings Insights Settings icon.
  4. In Auto Insight Settings, use the check boxes to select and deselect the columns you want Oracle Analytics to include or exclude in the data profiling.
  5. Click Apply.

Specify the Visualization Types That Auto Insights Displays

Auto Insights generates a variety of visualizations for a dataset. You can change the default Auto Insights settings to generate specific visualization types.

For example, suppose you want to find the seasonality behavior of sales by ship date to determine if there is a significant increase or decrease of sales during a specific shipment time period. In the Auto Insight settings you deselect all visualization types except Seasonality.
When you select the visualization types you want to include or exclude and click Apply, your selections are applied to the generated insights. Oracle Analytics saves and applies your visualization selections when you close and re-open the workbook. The visualization selections are user-specific. So your selections display for you and not for other users.
  1. Click Auto Insights,
  2. On the toolbar, click Auto Insights Auto Insight icon in yellow.
  3. Click Insight Settings Insights Settings icon.
  4. In Auto Insight Settings, click the tiles corresponding to the visualization types that you don't want to display.
  5. Click Apply.

Reset Auto Insights Settings

Oracle Analytics persists the workbook's Auto Insights column and visualization types settings when you close and reopen the workbook. You can revert to the default auto insights settings in a new or saved workbook.

The Auto Insights selections are user-specific. Resetting Auto Insights applies to you and not to other users.
  1. Create or open a workbook and display the Visualize panel.
  2. On the toolbar, click Auto Insights Auto Insight icon in yellow.
  3. Click Insight Settings Insights Settings icon.
  4. In Auto Insight Settings, click Reset to default settings to clear your selections and revert to the default auto insights settings.

Turn Auto Insights On or Off for a Dataset

Enable or disable Auto Insights for a dataset to control whether Oracle Analytics suggests visualizations when you add the dataset to a workbook. For example, you might turn off insights for a dataset if performance is impaired.

You can enable or disable insights for a dataset if you're the dataset owner or a shared user with write permissions on the dataset.
Oracle Analytics administrators can enable or disable Auto Insights for all datasets. See Performance and Compatibility Options.
  1. On the Home page, click Navigator, then Data, then Datasets.
  2. Click Actions for a Dataset, and select Inspect.
  3. On the General tab, select Enable Insights.
  4. Click Save.