  Where do cosmic X-rays come from? Every new unidentified X-ray source could
potentially revolutionize our understanding of the universe. The international
collaborative astronomy project EXTraS aimed at automatically classifying new
sources of X-ray emission (e.g., stars or galaxies) in the large observation
database of the X-ray satellite XMM-Newton. Because data archives have reached
dimensions of big data astronomers used different machine-learning (ML) random
forest decision tree algorithms that performed the classification process. In
this bachelor thesis in information design, I was interested in the challenge
to visualize these big data sets and the results of the ML algorithms in an
interactive and intuitive way to facilitate the visual exploration of its
internal structures and relationships. The VIRTUAL DATA COSMOS is an
interactive data visualization tool in virtual reality (VR) for scientists to
explore multidimensional data sets.
