关键词: 可视化, 螺旋图, 时间序列, 交互设计

Abstract: Phased time series data is common in daily life. It describes an event that contains a number of state transitions. Each state has a time attribute, and there are multiple paths between state transitions. Aiming at the problem that the existing visualization techniques are not sufficient in visualizing the transition of each phase or the time variation of paths between states, a novel visualization model based on spiral graph was proposed. In the proposed model, each state was represented by a circle and the states of an event were represented by a set of concentric circles, and the reachable paths between neighboring states were represented by spirals. The start point of each spiral depended on its start time and the start states, and the end point of each spiral depended on its end time and the end states. To solve the overlapping problem caused by large amount of paths, the transparency adjustment algorithm based on long-tailed function was applied on the paths. The transparency of each path was assigned according to the number of intersections of this path and other paths. Flexible interactive facilities such as path filtering, highlighting, bomb box and zooming were provided to support efficient data exploration. The proposed model was implemented on China railway data, the experimental result shows that the model can effectively display trains of any running duration in limited space and is able to reduce the chaos caused by paths overlapping when confronted with large amount of trains as well as keep the information of trains and provide decision support for the user route choice, which validates the effectiveness of the proposed model in visualizing phased time series data.

Key words: visualization, spiral graph, time series, interactive design