Visualization of financial trends using chance discovery methods

Abstract

Due to the concern of business performance and the consideration of possible investment, stakeholders inside and outside the business need to understand the financial status of a company. Usually, reading and interpreting the public offering financial statements is a common way to obtain an overall financial situation of a company. Apart from reading them directly, some visualization methods were employed so as to assist the less-professional stakeholders to understand the financial status more intuitively and painlessly. Chance discovery is one of the visualization methods which may be suitable to be applied in the financial trend detection area. In this study, a financial data visualization framework has been proposed to produce the serial KeyGraph for explaining the financial situations of two companies. Subsequently, an integrated map of financial trend was generated for depicting the overview of the accumulative five-year scenario. Finally, the visualization of financial trend was attained using serial KeyGraph and integrated map. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.