The present invention provides a method and system for constructing one or more a comprehensive summaries of event sequence(s). The present invention approaches the problem of finding the shortest yet most comprehensive summary of an event sequence by transforming this summarization problem into a concrete optimization problem and provides a computer-implementing technique for solving this optimization problem to construct and/or form the basis for constructing the summaries. The summaries describe an entire event sequence while at the same time reveal local associations between events of that sequence. In certain embodiments, the segmentation of the event sequence produced in accordance with the present invention is itself a summary of the event sequence. In other embodiments, the segmentation produced forms a basis for one or more summaries.