A Survey of Visualization of Temporal Event Sequence Data

Temporal event sequence data denotes the collection of one or more records that contain multiple time-stamped events. Recently, visualization has been widely introduced for frequent pattern discovery, similar sequence matching, and multi-stage progression detection from temporal event sequence data. This paper summarizes the related work from two aspects, namely, visual presentation methods and visual analytical approaches. For the first issue, four categories are classified: GanttChart-based, Flow-based, StoryLines-based and Matrix-based. For the second issue, four visual analysis tasks are summarized: pattern discovery and exploration, visual query, comparison analysis and outcome analysis. Meanwhile, existing visual analysis tools are introduced from the perspective of these tasks. Challenges and future trends of temporal event sequence data visualization are summarized, inspiring new ideas for future work directions.