Tech Report HCIL-2002-15

Keogh, E., Hochheiser, H., Shneiderman, B. (August 2002)
An Augmented Visual Query Mechanism for Finding Patterns in Time Series Data
Proc. Fifth International Conference on Flexible Query Answering Systems (October 27 - 29, 2002, Copenhagen, Denmark), Springer-Verlag, in the series Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence. [Published Version]
HCIL-2002-15, CS-TR-4398, UMIACS-TR-2002-78, ISR-TR-2005-32

Relatively few query tools exist for data exploration and pattern identifi-cation in time series data sets. In previous work we introduced Timeboxes. Time-boxes are rectangular, direct-manipulation queries for studying time-series datasets. We demonstrated how Timeboxes can be used to support interactive exploration via dynamic queries, along with overviews of query results and drag-and-drop support for query-by-example. In this paper, we extend our work by introducing Variable Time Timeboxes (VTT). VTTs are a natural generalization of Timeboxes, which permit the specification of queries that allow a degree of uncertainty in the time axis. We carefully motivate the need for these more expressive queries, and demon-strate the utility of our approach on several data sets.