Time series data reduction.

<p>The basic principle of data reduction to accelerate time series plotting: (a) A computer display uses discrete pixels to display a graph. (b) Plotting large amounts of data results in overdraw; several data points get plotted onto the same pixel column. A zoomed version of the marked area (red lines) in (b) is shown in (c) as an example for the amount of detail that can collapse onto a single pixel column. (d) Replacing the original time series dataset with a reduced dataset consisting of minimum and maximum values for each pixel column gives the same visual result. The reduced dataset in this example consists of only 48 data points compared to the original time series with 38,866 samples in (b) and can therefore be plotted considerably faster.