OM3: An Ordered Multi-level Min-Max Representation for Interactive Progressive Visualization of Time Series

Abstract

We present a novel multi-level representation of time series called OM3 that facilitates efficient interactive progressive visualization of large data stored in a database and supports various interactions such as resizing, panning, zooming, and visual query. Based on our proposed line-segment aggregation, this representation can produce error-free line visualizations that preserve the shape of a time series in windows of arbitrary sizes. To reduce the interaction latency, we develop an incremental tree-based query strategy to support progressive visualizations, allowing a finer control on the accuracy-time tradeoff. We quantitatively compare OM3 with state-of-the-art methods, including a method implemented on a leading time-series database InfluxDB, in two settings with databases residing either in the local area network or on the cloud. Results show that OM^3 maintains a low latency within 300~ms on the web browser and a high data reduction ratio regardless of the data size (ranging from millions to billions of records), achieving around 1,000 times faster than the state-of-the-art methods on the largest dataset experimented with.