Fig. 2

Three-dimensional state sequence analysis diagram: example of week as time unit. The main steps of this multidimensional modified version of SSA were to: Step 1) define the time unit for state sequences analysis (e.g. weeks); Step 2) for each of the three dimensions, select categorical states, specify their priorities and measure the state sequences to generate patient-sequences; Step 3) for each of the three dimensions, calculate the distance between each pair of patient-sequences using an appropriate dissimilarity measure method, resulting in three distance matrices; Step 4) calculate a pooled distance matrix by summing the three dimension-specific matrices; Step 5) based on the pooled distance matrix calculated in step 4, choose and apply a classification method resulting in groups of distinct patient-sequences; and finally 6) display results by visual representations offered by SSA for interpretation