2.5D Extension of ChronoView for Exploring Periodic Features of Temporal Data

Abstract

ChronoView is one of the visualization methods for temporal data. It arranges points representing event groups on a circle according to a rule so that it can visualize temporal features of many event groups together. However, the rule is based on a pre-specified display period; therefore, it is not suited to exploring periodic features for unknown periods. The authors extend ChronoView to a 2.5D representation and develop a visualization tool that can analyze temporal data about various periods efficiently. The visual representation has enabled analysts to search for the display periods expressing periodicity of events by displaying several charts of ChronoView in a 3D space and emphasizing the difference in positions of the events due to the difference of the display periods. The tool has functions to assist searching by showing the spectrum and the histogram calculated from the occurrence distribution of events. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the tool, the authors describe a use case of searching for periodic features from actual event data.