Title
Co-Bridges: Pair-Wise Visual Connection And Comparison For Multi-Item Data Streams
Abstract
In various domains, there are abundant streams or sequences of multi-item data of various kinds, e.g. streams of news and social media texts, sequences of genes and sports events, etc. Comparison is an important and general task in data analysis. For comparing data streams involving multiple items (e.g., words in texts, actors or action types in action sequences, visited places in itineraries, etc.), we propose Co-Bridges, a visual design involving connection and comparison techniques that reveal similarities and differences between two streams. Co-Bridges use river and bridge metaphors, where two sides of a river represent data streams, and bridges connect temporally or sequentially aligned segments of streams. Commonalities and differences between these segments in terms of involvement of various items are shown on the bridges. Interactive query tools support the selection of particular stream subsets for focused exploration. The visualization supports both qualitative (common and distinct items) and quantitative (stream volume, amount of item involvement) comparisons. We further propose Comparison-of-Comparisons, in which two or more Co-Bridges corresponding to different selections are juxtaposed. We test the applicability of the Co-Bridges in different domains, including social media text streams and sports event sequences. We perform an evaluation of the users' capability to understand and use Co-Bridges. The results confirm that Co-Bridges is effective for supporting pair-wise visual comparisons in a wide range of applications.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1109/TVCG.2020.3030411
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VISUALIZATION AND COMPUTER GRAPHICS
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Rivers, Social networking (online), Data visualization, Task analysis, Bridges, Visual analytics, Visual Comparison, Pair-wise Analysis, Multi-item Data Stream, Social Media
Journal
27
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
2
1077-2626
1
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
51
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Siming Chen112514.34
Natalia Andrienko22922192.14
Gennady Andrienko33106208.19
Jie Li4418.35
Xiaoru Yuan5115770.28