Visualizing Sequences in the Social Sciences

Abstract

Visualization is a potentially powerful tool for exploration and complexity reduction of categorical sequence data. This article discusses currently available sequence visualization against established criteria for graphical excellence in the visual display of quantitative information. Existing sequence graphs fall into two groups: They either represent categorical sequences or summarize them. The authors propose relative frequency sequence plots as an informative way of graphing sequence data and as a bridge between data representation graphs and data summarization graphs. The efficacy of the proposed plot is assessed by the R 2 and the F statistics. The applicability of the proposed graphs is demonstrated using data from the German Life History Study on women's family formation.

Sibling Similarity in Family Formation

“…Figure 3 shows relative frequency sequence and dissimilarity-to-medoid plots (Fasang and Liao 2014) for the five family-formation patterns derived with cluster analysis. The clusters are ordered ascending according to average education in each group, starting with the most-educated group in the top panel of Fig.…”

“…3 therefore show a selection of representative sequences for each cluster that comprise 2 % of the sample (186 representative sequences). They are chosen as the medoid sequence (Aassve et al 2007)-that is, the sequence with the minimum distance to all other sequences within equal-sized frequency groups across the clusters (for details, see Fasang and Liao 2014). The dissimilarity-to-medoid plots in the right panels of Fig.…”

Research on Students' Performance in Higher Education through Sequence Analysis

“…Therefore we use relative frequency sequence plots to graphically display the sequences (Fasang & Liao 2014). For the relative frequency sequence plots, first the sequences of each subgroup are sorted according to a score of the first factor derived with multidimensional scaling (see also Piccareta and Lior 2010).…”

“…Then each sample of the four comparison groups is divided into 100 equally sized frequency groups. For each of these frequency groups, the medoid sequence, also calculated using optimal matching with constant substitution costs of 2 and indel costs of 1, is chosen as the representative of these medoids (see Fasang an Liao 2014 for details).…”

Medidas De Similaridade Entre Séries Temporais

“…Também, uma série temporal apresenta marcações de tempo, estas marcações geralmente apresentam diferentes números de aspectos, como por exemplo, um número diferente de estados (um estadoé um valor observado em um determinado tempo específico), o número de transições (por exemplo as mudanas de direções), e a distribuição da duração de cada evento (quanto tempo dura um evento) através de cada estado. Cada um destes aspectos contribui para agregar uma propriedade específica a cada série temporal, e esta propriedadeé denominada complexidade (26 …”