In accordance with various embodiments, described herein are systems and methods for use of computer-implemented machine learning to automatically determine insights of facts, segments, outliers, or other information associated with a set of data, for use in generating visualizations of the data. In accordance with an embodiment, the system can receive a data set that includes data points having data values and attributes, and a target attribute, and use a machine learning process to automatically determine one or more other attributes as driving factors for the target attribute, based on, for example, the use of a decision tree and a comparison of information gain, Gini, or other indices associated with attributes in the data set. Information describing facts associated with the data set can be graphically displayed at a user interface, as visualizations, and used as a starting point for further analysis of the data set.