Visualizing a Million Time Series with the Density Line Chart

by todsacerdoti • 1 year ago

30 3 1 year ago

wtallis• 1 year ago

This is pretty interesting. I've seen a similar technique for handling a single time series when the number of data points far exceeds the number of pixels, doing a two-dimensional histogram rather than connecting subsequent dots with line segments. I hadn't thought about how to do that for the case of having an extremely large number of time series overlaid on each other. This approach seems to produce results similar to what you'd see on an oscilloscope or an eye diagram.

domoritz• 1 year ago

Author of this paper here. Cool to see this show up on HN. Little story about this paper: Danyel and I did this while I was on an internship at Microsoft Research. The algorithm was too simple to get it published at a conference, but the technique has been adopted in a few places now, including other papers. We did some follow-up work to more efficiently compute the density and also support interactive filtering. See https://www.domoritz.de/papers/2021-KDBox-VIS.pdf.

dleeftink• 1 year ago

The algorithm was too simple to get it published at a conference

As an outsider looking in, wouldn't you rather have simpler algorithms than complex? As the saying goes, perfection isn't reached by adding but when there's nothing left to take off

Visualizing a Million Time Series with the Density Line Chart

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