A New Tool for Visualizing Categorical Time Series Data

It is often necessary to analyze a sequence of non-numeric data in which each item in the sequence belongs to a predetermined category. A sequence of coin flips is an example. We have two categories – heads and tails. Each element in the sequence is either a head or a tail. Similarly, a book can be analyzed as a sequence of letters or words, a genetic sequence can be analyzed as a sequence of amino acids. Such data sets are often referred to as categorical time series data. We will demonstrate and describe the development of a tool for producing visualizations of categorical time series data. We will also describe some of the algorithms used to produce these visualizations and some optimizations developed to accommodate large datasets.