Yes, the primary utility is to understand how discriminative your features are. There is no meaning of what each face represents.
Checkout the Chernoff Fish demo posted below by the user meagher here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16664051. Play with different features, say for example, 'performance'. When you change the value of 'performance', the eye size changes. However, the eye size doesn't mean anything except for you to visually understand variations in data. If 'performance' was mapped to, say, fin size, it doesn't change its meaning.
Would people more readily recognize that say, "Large Spiky Orange Fish" strategies lead to greater returns, compared to if the strategies were presented as "Short | Value Investment | Large Market Capitalization"?
This could also be an interesting way of eliminating inherent bias while leveraging human pattern recognition abilities. Represent values pictorially, and hide data labels.
Checkout the Chernoff Fish demo posted below by the user meagher here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16664051. Play with different features, say for example, 'performance'. When you change the value of 'performance', the eye size changes. However, the eye size doesn't mean anything except for you to visually understand variations in data. If 'performance' was mapped to, say, fin size, it doesn't change its meaning.