We propose an information theoretic approach to produce a well-ordered data table. In particular, we search for ordering that minimizes entropy of residuals of predictive coding applied on the ordered data table.
This formalization leads to a novel ordering procedure, EMordering, that can be applied separately on rows and columns.
For ordering of rows, EM-ordering repeats until convergence the steps of (1) rescaling columns and (2) solving a Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) where rows are treated as cities.