EventColumn: Integrating Event Sequences into Tabular Visualizations

Original 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 generalizes to a wide range of event sequence datasets with additional tabular attributes. 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.