C-TREND: Temporal cluster graphs for identifying and visualizing trends in multiattribute transactional data

Organizations and firms are capturing increasingly more data about their customers, suppliers, competitors, and business environment. Most of this data is multi-attribute (multi-dimensional) and temporal in nature. Data mining and business intelligence techniques are often used to discover patterns in such data; however, mining temporal relationships typically is a complex task. We propose a new data analysis and visualization technique for representing trends in multi-attribute temporal data using a clustering-based approach. We introduce C-TREND, a system that implements the temporal cluster graph construct, which maps multi-attribute temporal data to a two-dimensional directed graph that identifies trends in dominant data types over time. In this paper, we present our temporal clustering-based technique, discuss its algorithmic implementation and performance, demonstrate applications of the technique by analyzing data on wireless networking technologies and baseball batting statistics, and introduce a set of metrics for further analysis of discovered trends.