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I don't believe she did. She investigated the specific problem of helping users to identify deviations in time series by applying smoothing. Here is a link to

by SEJeff 9y ago

I don't believe she did. She investigated the specific problem of helping users to identify deviations in time series by applying smoothing. Here is a link to her presentation: https://vimeo.com/221062931 https://vimeo.com/221062931 It is pretty fascinating, I do recommend giving it a watch.

krong 9y ago
Thanks!
srean 9y ago
I upvoted the authors comment linking the Arxiv paper, that said, I think the presentation oversold the claim that smoothing is always a good thing to do. In particular, showing that excel, grafana, graphite etc, do not smooth by default, (apparently because it is a hard) looked like a low point of the talk, sorry. Smoothing has its uses but its hardly the panacea. What is an appropriate smoothing is very context sensitive and I would like the consumer of the plots be in charge of that. Sometimes smoothing away the high frequencies or transients are exactly the wrong thing to do (for example, when you care about transient spikes) I have seen more than enough damage done by plotting tools sneaking in a smoothing without informing the consumer. Especially so in the monitoring space. When the user expects raw plots it better be raw, and raw is a good default. Smoothening should be invoked explicitly.
- krong 9y ago
  Thanks for the comment. I strongly agree that smoothing is not always beneficial and that the users should be informed and have control of the amount of the smoothing that is being applied to their plots. We developed ASAP with the intend to complement, instead of replacing the raw plots. We view ASAP more as a "smart default" - if you were to expose a slide bar of different moving average window sizes that users could apply to their visualizations, where should a reasonable default be on that slide bar? In addition, ASAP does not always choose to smooth the visualizations. In some cases (e.g. Figure C.1 in the arXiv paper) where the raw plots already have a few well-defined outlying regions and smoothing would only decrease the extent of such deviations, ASAP leaves the visualization unsmoothed.
  - srean 9y ago
    That sounds very sensible.
jnordwick 9y ago
Thanks! Update: Hi Jeff!
- SEJeff 9y ago
  Small world buddy! Shoot me an email (from the github link on my profile)

by SEJeff 9y ago

krong 9y ago

Thanks!

srean 9y ago

I upvoted the authors comment linking the Arxiv paper, that said, I think the presentation oversold the claim that smoothing is always a good thing to do. In particular, showing that excel, grafana, graphite etc, do not smooth by default, (apparently because it is a hard) looked like a low point of the talk, sorry. Smoothing has its uses but its hardly the panacea. What is an appropriate smoothing is very context sensitive and I would like the consumer of the plots be in charge of that. Sometimes smoothing away the high frequencies or transients are exactly the wrong thing to do (for example, when you care about transient spikes) I have seen more than enough damage done by plotting tools sneaking in a smoothing without informing the consumer. Especially so in the monitoring space. When the user expects raw plots it better be raw, and raw is a good default. Smoothening should be invoked explicitly.

krong 9y ago
Thanks for the comment. I strongly agree that smoothing is not always beneficial and that the users should be informed and have control of the amount of the smoothing that is being applied to their plots. We developed ASAP with the intend to complement, instead of replacing the raw plots. We view ASAP more as a "smart default" - if you were to expose a slide bar of different moving average window sizes that users could apply to their visualizations, where should a reasonable default be on that slide bar? In addition, ASAP does not always choose to smooth the visualizations. In some cases (e.g. Figure C.1 in the arXiv paper) where the raw plots already have a few well-defined outlying regions and smoothing would only decrease the extent of such deviations, ASAP leaves the visualization unsmoothed.
- srean 9y ago
  That sounds very sensible.

jnordwick 9y ago

Thanks! Update: Hi Jeff!

SEJeff 9y ago
Small world buddy! Shoot me an email (from the github link on my profile)