Exploring temporal patterns with information visualization: keynote

After an overview of visualizations to explore temporal patterns, we will focus on interfaces for discovering temporal event patterns in electronic health records. Specifying event sequence queries is challenging even for skilled computer professionals familiar with SQL. Our novel interactive search strategies allow for aligning records on important events, ranking, and filtering combined with grouping of results to find common or rare events. A second approach is to use query-by-example, in which users specify a pattern and see a similarity-ranked list of results, but the similarity measure needs to be customized for different needs. Temporal summaries allow comparisons between groups. We will discuss the methods we use to evaluate the usefulness of our interfaces through collaborations with clinicians and hospital administrators on case studies. Finally, application of the techniques to other domains will be discussed.