research-article

LifeFlow: visualizing an overview of event sequences

Authors:

Krist Wongsuphasawat,

John Alexis Guerra Gómez,

Catherine Plaisant,

Taowei David Wang,

Meirav Taieb-Maimon,

Ben ShneidermanAuthors Info & Claims

CHI '11: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Pages 1747 - 1756

https://doi.org/10.1145/1978942.1979196

Published: 07 May 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Event sequence analysis is an important task in many domains: medical researchers may study the patterns of transfers within the hospital for quality control; transportation experts may study accident response logs to identify best practices. In many cases they deal with thousands of records. While previous research has focused on searching and browsing, overview tasks are often overlooked. We introduce a novel interactive visual overview of event sequences called \emph{LifeFlow}. LifeFlow is scalable, can summarize all possible sequences, and represents the temporal spacing of the events within sequences. Two case studies with healthcare and transportation domain experts are presented to illustrate the usefulness of LifeFlow. A user study with ten participants confirmed that after 15 minutes of training novice users were able to rapidly answer questions about the prevalence and temporal characteristics of sequences, find anomalies, and gain significant insight from the data.

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Index Terms

LifeFlow: visualizing an overview of event sequences
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Human computer interaction (HCI)
2. Information systems
  1. Information systems applications

Index terms have been assigned to the content through auto-classification.

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

CHI '11: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

May 2011

3530 pages

ISBN:9781450302289

DOI:10.1145/1978942

General Chair:
Desney Tan
Microsoft Research
,
Program Chairs:
Geraldine Fitzpatrick
Vienna University of Technology
,
Carl Gutwin
University of Saskatchewan
,
Bo Begole
PARC
,
Wendy A. Kellogg
IBM Research

Copyright © 2011 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 07 May 2011

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CHI '11: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

May 7 - 12, 2011

BC, Vancouver, Canada

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CHI '11 Paper Acceptance Rate 410 of 1,532 submissions, 27%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

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https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2024.3382760
Liu SMa RZhao CLi ZXiao JLi Q(2024)BPCoach: Exploring Hero Drafting in Professional MOBA Tournaments via Visual AnalyticsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36373038:CSCW1(1-31)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3637303
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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TVCG.2024.3456510
Tang JYang FWu JWang YZhou JCai XYu LWu Y(2024)A Comparative Study on Fixed-Order Event Sequence Visualizations: Gantt, Extended Gantt, and Stringline ChartsIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics10.1109/TVCG.2024.335891930:12(7687-7701)Online publication date: Dec-2024
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