## 2.1 Introduction

We develop a method for organizing and visualizing temporal data, collected at sub-daily intervals, into a calendar layout. The calendar format is created using linear algebra, giving a restructuring of the data, that can then be integrated into a data pipeline. The core component of the pipeline is to visualise the resulting data using the grammar of graphics (Wilkinson 2005; Wickham 2009), as used in ggplot2 (H. Wickham, Chang, et al. 2018), which defines plots as a functional mapping from data points to graphical primitives. The data restructuring approach is consistent with the tidy data principles available in the tidyverse (Wickham 2017) suite. The methods are implemented in a new R package called sugrrants (Wang, Cook, and Hyndman 2018b).

The purpose of the calendar-based visualization is to provide insights into people’s daily schedules relative to events such as work days, weekends, holidays, and special events. This work was originally motivated by studying foot traffic in the city of Melbourne, Australia (City of Melbourne 2017). There have been 43 sensors installed that count pedestrians every hour across the inner-city area until the end of 2016 (Figure 2.1). The data set can shed light on people’s daily rhythms, and assist the city administration and local businesses with event planning and operational management. A routine examination of the data would involve constructing conventional time series plots to catch a glimpse of temporal patterns. The faceted plots in Figure 2.2 give an overall picture of the foot traffic at three different sensors over 2016. Further faceting by day of the week (Figure 2.3) provides a better glimpse of the daily and sub-daily pedestrian patterns.

However, the conventional displays of time series data conceal patterns relative to special events (such as public holidays and recurring cultural/sport events), which may be worth noting to viewers.

The work is inspired by Wickham et al. (2012), which uses linear algebra to display spatio-temporal data as glyphs on maps. It is also related to recent work by Hafen (2018) which provides methods in the geofacet R package to arrange data plots into a grid, while preserving the geographical position. Both of these show data in a spatial context.

In contrast, calendar-based graphics unpack the temporal variable, at different resolutions, to digest multiple seasonalities and special events. There is some existing work in this area. For example, Van Wijk and Van Selow (1999) developed a calendar view of the heatmap to represent the number of employees in the work place over a year, where colors indicate different clusters derived from the days. It contrasts week days and weekends, highlights public holidays, and presents other known seasonal variation such as school vacations, all of which have influence over the turn-outs in the office. Alongside Jones (2016), Wong (2013), Kothari and Ather (2016), and Jacobs (2017) implemented some variants of calendar-based heatmaps as in R packages: TimeProjection, ggTimeSeries, and ggcal respectively. However, these techniques are limited to color-encoding graphics and are unable to use time scales smaller than a day. Time of day, which serves as one of the most important aspects in explaining substantial variations arising from the pedestrian sensor data, will be neglected through daily aggregation. Additionally, if simply using colored blocks rather than curves, it may become perceptually difficult to estimate the shape positions and changes, although using curves comes with the cost of more display capacity (Cleveland and McGill 1984; Lam, Munzner, and Kincaid 2007).

We propose a new algorithm to go beyond the calendar-based heatmap. The approach is developed with three conditions in mind: (1) to display time-of-day variation in addition to longer temporal components such as day-of-week and day-of-year; (2) to incorporate line graphs and other types of glyphs into the graphical toolkit for the calendar layout; (3) to enable overlaying plots consisting of multiple time series. The proposed algorithm has been implemented in the frame_calendar function in the sugrrants package using R.

The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2.2 demonstrates the construction of the calendar layout in depth. Section 2.2.1 describes the algorithms of data transformation. Section 2.2.2 lists and describes the options that come with the frame_calendar function. Section 2.2.3 presents some variations of its usage. Graphical analyses of sub-daily people’s activities are illustrated with a case study in Section 2.3. Section 2.4 discusses the limitations of calendar displays and possible new directions.