EventColumn: Integrating Event Sequences into Tabular Visualizations

Authors

Jakob Zethofer (Pro2Future GmbH), Andreas Hinterreiter (Johannes Kepler University), Lukas Schiefermüller (voestalpine Stahl GmbH), Belgin Mutlu (Pro2Future GmbH), Marc Streit (Johannes Kepler University Linz)

Presentation

Session
Connecting the Dots
Time
Wednesday, Nov 11, 13:45 – 13:54 (US/Eastern) · session 13:00 – 14:30
Location
Hall Essex north

Keywords

Event sequence visualization, tabular visualization, visual analytics, decision support, production logistics.

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 applies to other event-sequence domains. 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.

For Practitioners

We expect that anyone working in analyzing manufacturing data such as production events and warehouse logistics would be interested, as they can directly try out our visualization in Power BI.