PhD Program Spring School 2006
FinDEx: A Spectral Visualization System for Analyzing Financial Time Series Data
| speaker | Hartmut Ziegler Tilo Nietzschmann |
| date | March 09, 2006 |
| abstract | Visual data analysis of time related data sets has attracted much research interest recently and a number of sophisticated visualization methods have been proposed in the past. In financial analysis, however, the most important and most common visualization techniques for time series data are still charts. Although they are intuitive and make it easy to spot the effect of key events on a assets' prices and its performance over a period of time, price charts do not allow the easy perception of relative movement in terms of growth rates, which are the key feature of any price-related time series. The paper presents a novel "Growth Matrix" visualization technique for analysing assets, which extends the ability of existing chart techniques, since it not only shows the performance of assets over fixed time frames, but it also shows their performance and growth rates for each subinterval of the time frame in a single view. This is an essential feature in financial analysis. At the same time it allows the comparison of the complete set of subinterval growth rates for groups of assets and their relevant indexes, by employing appropriate sorted layouts. Our technique provides a powerful way for analysing financial data, since it allows the identification of strong and weak periods of assets compared to global market characteristics, and thus allows a more encompassing visual classification into ''good'' and ''poor" assets than existing chart techniques. We provide real world asset market application examples that show the abilities of the new approach and its high relevance for financial analysis task. |