Design of an Interactive and Web-based Software for the Management, Analysis and Transformation of Time-Series

Abstract

Every day, time series data are generated in large volumes in a wide range of applications in nearly every organization. However, the management and analysis of these data still pose a great challenge to end users who have little programming experience and little knowledge of time series analysis models. Although, many tools exist for time series analysis, a review of these tools shows that they are usually designed for data experts and analysts.

In this research, an interactive web based time series software is designed for ease of use by end users. The software design aligns with typical properties of an end user oriented software for managing, analyzing and transforming time series.

Firstly, this thesis reports on the current state of research on time series and their commonness in private and public spreadsheets. Time series are identified in real world spreadsheets and results show that 14 percent of spreadsheets in the EUSES corpus and Enrons corpus are time series. Then, a review of some existing time series tools is made. This review reveals that:

1. Only a few of these tools are easy to use for end users. Hitherto, most time series tools have been developed for usage by professional analysts and data scientists.
2. Most of the tools give poor support for the transformation of time series; which involves the reduction of time-stamped data to time series or the conversion of time series from one level of time frequency to another.

A set of functional requirements for the thesis software is then generated from the review of the existing tools. These requirements form the basis for the software design in this research. The usage scenarios of the time series software designed are illustrated using mockups. This clearly illustrates how users can work with the software to effectively manage, transform and analyze time series data.

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