Event Duration Intervals
In Timeline, the duration of an event means the time between its occurrence and the moment it is replaced by the occurrence of another event. This approach will be helpful if you need to assess time spent between the general steps of a process.
Event duration is selected by default as a metric to base intervals on. To achieve the most illustrative configuration according to the requirements of your analysis task, the metric values require further manual adjustment. However, before proceeding with the actual configuration, it is important to get familiar with crucial aspects of the involved metrics in the context of Interval measurements.
Aspects of calculation
- When providing a configuration for Interval measurements based on the Event duration metric you specify the events as borders of the intervals that should be displayed on the resulting histogram. The metric shows the time gap between selected events. In this analysis module, after the events are specified, the program will search for all their occurrences in timelines, matching them pair by pair within a single timeline. Then every detected pair is added as a separate interval to the resulting histogram. You can make the search more detailed by specifying which occurrence of event is of interest, or choose to consider only event occurrences with a certain attribute. Then on the histogram, you will see an illustration of all the detected pairs fitting your definition.
- Timeline considers a pair of events as an interval only if an actual time gap exists between them. It means that if an event is followed immediately by another one (the time gap between them is 0 seconds) they will be ignored by the calculation. This may also result in a lesser count of events than expected.
- In the context of Interval measurements, the histogram shows the intervals themselves and not the timelines containing them. To learn more about the histogram and its peculiarities, see Interval Histogram.
Configuration
- Define the interval boundaries by selecting two events.
To do it, click the "+" icon on the interval start and end, then select one or multiple events from the list in the appeared window. Here you can also specify an attribute as an optional parameter. In this case, the histogram will consider only the events that have this particular attribute with matching values, ignoring those where this attribute is absent or has a null value.
When the start and end of the interval are selected, a histogram appears, and you can adjust its details. - Define If multiple, use: option.
This parameter specifies which occurrence of the selected event to consider when defining a pair for interval calculation: the first one or the last one.
The behavior of this parameter can be different for the cases described in the examples below.Show examples
- Select Time attribute.
This parameter specifies the source of the time value to consider when calculating the interval: the event's Timestamp, or some additional data columns that have a time/date format. These parameters will be listed by their names in the drop-down list. If your current data does not have any additional time-related attributes, Timestamp will be the only option.
9/5/2024 4:23:54 PM