Set Streams: Visual Exploration of Dynamic Overlapping Sets

Abstract

In many applications, membership of set elements changes over time. Since each element can be present in multiple sets, the sets also overlap. As a result, it becomes challenging to visualize the temporal change in set membership of elements across several timesteps while showing individual set intersections.We propose Set Streams, a visualization technique that represents changing set structures on a timeline as branching and merging streams. The streams encode the changing membership of elements with set intersections. A query-based selection mechanism supports a flexible comparison of selected groups of elements across the temporal evolution. The main timeline view is complemented with additional panels to provide details about the elements. While the proposed visualization is an application-independent visualization technique for dynamic sets, we demonstrate its effectiveness and applicability through three diverse application examples and expert feedback.