EventColumn: Integrating Event Sequences into Tabular Visualizations

TL;DR

EventColumn is a novel visualization tool that unifies event sequences with tabular data, enabling comprehensive analysis of complex datasets in industries like steel production and e-commerce.

Contribution

It introduces a new column type that integrates event sequences with heterogeneous tabular attributes, supporting simultaneous comparison and analysis.

Findings

Supports comparison of event sequences and tabular data in a single view

Demonstrated integration with Taggle and Power BI on real datasets

Facilitates analysis of production and logistics data

Abstract

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.