Interactive horizon graphs: improving the compact visualization of multiple time series

  • Authors:
  • Charles Perin;Frédéric Vernier;Jean-Daniel Fekete

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Paris-Sud, Orsay & INRIA, Saclay, France;University of Paris-Sud, Orsay, France;INRIA, Saclay, France

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

Many approaches have been proposed for the visualization of multiple time series. Two prominent approaches are reduced line charts (RLC), which display small multiples for time series, and the more recent horizon graphs (HG). We propose to unify RLC and HG using a new technique - interactive horizon graphs (IHG) - which uses pan and zoom interaction to increase the number of time series that can be analysed in parallel. In a user study we compared RLC, HG, and IHG across several tasks and numbers of time series, focusing on datasets with both large scale and small scale variations. Our results show that IHG outperform the other two techniques in complex comparison and matching tasks where the number of charts is large. In the hardest task PHG have a significantly higher number of good answers (correctness) than HG (+14%) and RLC (+51%) and a lower error magnitude than HG (-64%) and RLC (-86%).