Rendering the order of life events

This article proposes a decorated parallel coordinate plot for longitudinal categorical data, featuring a jitter mechanism revealing the diversity of observed longitudinal patterns and allowing the tracking of each individual pattern, variable point and line widths reflecting weighted pattern frequencies, the rendering of simultaneous events, and different flter options for highlighting typical patterns. The proposed visual display has been developed for describing and exploring the temporal ordering of events, but it can be equally applied to other types of longitudinal categorical data. Alongside the description of the principle of the plot, we demonstrate the scope of the plot with two real applications.