CS598KGK
Kazuhisa INABA
Paper critiques for Jan 25,2008
Arc Diagram: Visualizing Structure in Strings
By Martin Wattenberg
This paper presents a visualizing method for structure in strings. The uniqueness of
this research is that it uses diagrams for visualization.
The basic idea in this research is 1. Finding repeating sequence of strings, 2. Linking
them with diagrams. Although this is a simple algorithm, it has a problem with “too
many small repeated subsequences”. This problem was solved with a filter for
subsequence length.
This method is applied in several strings. First one is music. I believe that the
visualization of music reminds us the structure of it.
Second application is text files. This paper uses Java class file. HTML text file and
DNA sequence. The results are very interesting.
I thought the great advantage of this method is that we can use it in real time. It can
update the visualizations. Though I know some visualization methods, they can not
deal with time series data.
If possible I would like to use this method for people’s activities, such as POS in
shop, business activities and so on. Data in these area usually contains a lot of noise.
Therefore, as author mentioned in summary, fuzzy technique will be very usuful.
