Temporal raster plot

Each occurrence is registered in a Cartesian coordinate system, in which both axes show time but have different time resolutions: one axis shows slices of data, the other some sensible interval.

[1] When visualized, particularly the color-coded variant of the plot may easily show a carpet-like pattern.

Temporal raster plots make it easy to show time-based relations within large sets of time-interval data and often make it easy to recognize local maxima and minima.

In the following example, the data is one year's worth of measurements of the outdoor temperatures in Augsburg, with four samples taken per hour.

Despite the high number of measure points (about 35000), it is easy to distinguish local and global patterns.