EventColumn: Integrating Event Sequences into Tabular Visualizations
For analysts working with event sequences and tabular data, EventColumn provides a novel unified visualization that addresses the lack of integrated comparison tools.
EventColumn introduces a new column type that integrates event-sequence data with tabular attributes into a single table, enabling simultaneous comparison of both. It was validated on steel production logistics and e-commerce data, showing improved analysis capabilities.
We introduce EventColumn, a new column type that integrates event-sequence data with heterogeneous tabular attributes into a single unified table. EventColumn lets analysts compare event sequences alongside numerical, categorical, and temporal attributes at both instance and group levels, offering a compressed overview, heatmap group summaries, alignment by event types, and boxplots of similar historical items. We developed EventColumn together with collaborators from the steel industry to facilitate the analysis of production events and warehouse logistics, but the solution generalizes to a wide range of event sequence datasets with additional tabular attributes. Unlike most existing approaches that compare either event sequences or tables, EventColumn supports simultaneous comparison of both. We demonstrate its integration with Taggle and Microsoft Power BI on data from steel production logistics and on a public e-commerce dataset.