A survey of approaches for event sequence analysis and visualization

Event sequence data is increasingly available. Many business operations are supported by information systems that record transactions, events, state changes, message exchanges, and similar elements. This observation also applies to various industries, including production, logistics, healthcare, financial services, and education. The variety of application areas explains that techniques for event sequence data analysis have been developed rather independently in different fields of computer science. Most prominent are contributions from information visualization and from process mining. So far, the contributions from these two fields have neither been compared nor have they been mapped to an integrated framework. Such intransparency is problematic since it bears the risk of opportunities of integration are missed and concepts established in one field are independently reinvented in the other one. In this paper, we develop the Event Sequence Visualization framework (ESeVis) that gives due credit to the traditions of both fields. Our mapping study provides an integrated perspective on both fields and identifies potential for synergies for future research.

Automated summary

This paper presents the development of event sequence data analysis techniques in different fields and proposes an integrated framework to facilitate collaboration and research synergy across various domains.