Sequence explorer is an approach to provide insights into business questions like:
For this class of questions, the large number of combinations poses a severe practical challenge. Due to the explorative nature, an intuitive visualization is well-suited for such business questions. More specifically, a visualization can provide a unique representation for both revealing insights and for intuitive user interaction based on business knowledge or own hypotheses.
The basic idea of sequence explorer is to visualize events over time or any other sequence. The underlying visualization is a sankey diagram with the events and the time units forming a fixed grid. As a result, occurences of the same event are depicted by rectangles at the same horizontal position whereas different events at the same time are rectangles aligned at the same vertical position.
The height of a rectangle denotes the frequency of this event at that particular time and the thickness of a path connecting two rectangles (events) corresponds to the number of occurences of these two events in that particular order.
The interactive exploration is supported in the following ways:
Feel free to jump right to the links to a demo, a video, and the source code on github.