Comparative analysis of event sequence data is essential in many application domains, such as website design and medical care. However, analysts often face two challenges: they may not always know which sets of event sequences in the data are useful to compare, and the comparison needs to be achieved at different granularity, due to the volume and complexity of the data. This paper presents, ICE, an interactive visualization that allows analysts to explore an event sequence dataset, and identify promising sets of event sequences to compare at both the pattern and sequence levels. More specifically, ICE incorporates a multi-level matrix-based visualization for browsing the entire dataset based on the prefixes and suffixes of sequences. To support comparison at multiple levels, ICE employs the unit visualization technique, and we further explore the design space of unit visualizations for event sequence comparison tasks. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of ICE with three real-world datasets from different domains.

中文翻译：

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ICE：通过多尺度矩阵和单元可视化识别和比较事件序列集

事件序列数据的比较分析在许多应用领域都是必不可少的，例如网站设计和医疗保健。然而，分析师通常面临两个挑战：他们可能并不总是知道数据中哪些事件序列集对比较有用，并且由于数据的数量和复杂性，需要在不同的粒度上进行比较。本文介绍了 ICE，这是一种交互式可视化，允许分析师探索事件序列数据集，并确定有希望的事件序列集，以在模式和序列级别进行比较。更具体地说，ICE 结合了基于多级矩阵的可视化，用于根据序列的前缀和后缀浏览整个数据集。为了支持多层次的比较，ICE 采用了单元可视化技术，我们进一步探索了用于事件序列比较任务的单元可视化的设计空间。最后，我们用来自不同领域的三个真实世界数据集证明了 ICE 的有效性。