My data contains a set of start times and duration for an action. I would like to plot this so that for a given time slice I can see how many actions are active. I'm currently thinking of this as a histogram with time on the x axis and number of active actions on the y axis.
My question is, how should I adjust the data so that this is able to be plotted?
The times for an action can be between 2 seconds and a minute. And, at any given time I would estimate there could be about 100 actions taking place. Ideally a single plot would be able to show hours of data. The accuracy of the data is in milliseconds.
In the past the way that I have done this is to count for each second how many actions started , ended, or were active. This gave me a count of active actions for each second. The issue I found with this technique was that it made it difficult to adjust the time slice that I was looking at. Looking at a time slice of a minute was difficult to compute and looking at time slices of less than a second was impossible.
I'm open to any advice on how to think about this issue.
Thanks in advance!