I'll just say upfront that I'm the cofounder of Periscope (https://www.periscope.io/) which is specifically marketed at data scientists, so I have a horse in this race. :)
There are two kinds of charts: Charts designed to find information, and charts designed to sell information. The latter are often gorgeous and many-dimensional: Heatmaps, animated bubble charts, charts with time sliders, etc. And by all means, if selling the data is required, then sell it with the best tool for the job.
As for actually investigating the data, it's usually a lot of tables, lines and bars. They're simple to understand, and there's no cleverness in the visualization that might hide critical information.
To answer your questions, at Periscope I've seen:
1. A line graph of amplitude over time. You should see the frequency emerge clear as day. If you want to calculate frequency explicitly, you could overlay a second line with its own axis. Again, super simple, but gives you the answer directly.
2. I've seen a lot of fancy graph visualizations, but nothing that makes me happy. Depending on what you want to know about your graph, maybe a simple table with a structure like:
[node name][node name][weight]
Or:
[timestamp][node name][node name][weight]
A pivot table on top of this data, transoforming the second node column into the table's horizontal axis, can also be useful.
3. OK, obviously I think Periscope is a great choice here. Loads of data analysts use it to visualize time series data on many tens/hundreds of billions of data points.
That said, other good choices are: Excel, R/Stata/Matlab, gnuplot, Apache Pig. And for the data storage itself, IMO Amazon Redshift is unparalleled.
While working on signal processing and some graph data structures, I was looking for a simple code snippet to add in my code and be able to quickly visualise the data in my web browser. I was tempted to implement it myself a bunch of times, but I never got the time to actually do it.
What I ended up doing is dumping my data points into a CSV files and use excel, which was really bad if I had more than 50k data points (I am on running Mac OS X).
Periscope is amazing btw.
For ping-and-visualize, I'd recommend a tool that'll give you raw access to the underlying data. Some choices are https://amplitude.com/ and https://segment.com/. Happy to chat about pros and cons if you're curious -- harry@periscope.io.
There are two kinds of charts: Charts designed to find information, and charts designed to sell information. The latter are often gorgeous and many-dimensional: Heatmaps, animated bubble charts, charts with time sliders, etc. And by all means, if selling the data is required, then sell it with the best tool for the job.
As for actually investigating the data, it's usually a lot of tables, lines and bars. They're simple to understand, and there's no cleverness in the visualization that might hide critical information.
To answer your questions, at Periscope I've seen:
1. A line graph of amplitude over time. You should see the frequency emerge clear as day. If you want to calculate frequency explicitly, you could overlay a second line with its own axis. Again, super simple, but gives you the answer directly.
2. I've seen a lot of fancy graph visualizations, but nothing that makes me happy. Depending on what you want to know about your graph, maybe a simple table with a structure like:
Or: A pivot table on top of this data, transoforming the second node column into the table's horizontal axis, can also be useful.3. OK, obviously I think Periscope is a great choice here. Loads of data analysts use it to visualize time series data on many tens/hundreds of billions of data points.
That said, other good choices are: Excel, R/Stata/Matlab, gnuplot, Apache Pig. And for the data storage itself, IMO Amazon Redshift is unparalleled.