SENSOR: Data-driven Construction of Sketch-based Visual Query Interfaces for Time Series Data

Sketching is a common approach to visually query time series data. However, a recent study reported that sketching a pattern for querying is “often ineffective on its own” in practice due to lack of “representative objects” to facilitate bottom-up search. In this demonstration, we present a novel data-driven sketch-based visual query interface (VQI) construction system called sensor to alleviate this challenge. Given a time series dataset, sensor automatically constructs its VQI by populating different components from the underlying data. Specifically, it discovers and exposes a set of representative objects in the form of VST-aware shapelets to facilitate query formulation. Such data-driven construction has several potential benefits such as empowering efficient top-down and bottom-up search and portability of the interface across different application domains and sources.