  Temporal event data are collected across a broad range of domains, and a
variety of visual analytics techniques have been developed to empower analysts
working with this form of data. These techniques generally display aggregate
statistics computed over sets of event sequences that share common patterns.
Such techniques are often hindered, however, by the high-dimensionality of many
real-world event sequence datasets because the large number of distinct event
types within such data prevents effective aggregation. A common coping strategy
for this challenge is to group event types together as a pre-process, prior to
visualization, so that each group can be represented within an analysis as a
single event type. However, computing these event groupings as a pre-process
also places significant constraints on the analysis. This paper presents a
dynamic hierarchical aggregation technique that leverages a predefined
hierarchy of dimensions to computationally quantify the informativeness of
alternative levels of grouping within the hierarchy at runtime. This allows
users to dynamically explore the hierarchy to select the most appropriate level
of grouping to use at any individual step within an analysis. Key contributions
include an algorithm for interactively determining the most informative set of
event groupings from within a large-scale hierarchy of event types, and a
scatter-plus-focus visualization that supports interactive hierarchical
exploration. While these contributions are generalizable to other types of
problems, we apply them to high-dimensional event sequence analysis using
large-scale event type hierarchies from the medical domain. We describe their
use within a medical cohort analysis tool called Cadence, demonstrate an
example in which the proposed technique supports better views of event sequence
data, and report findings from domain expert interviews.
