[R] ggplot2 and lattice

Wayne F wdf61 at mac.com
Tue Dec 16 17:13:33 CET 2008



stephen sefick wrote:
> 
> yes a parallel coordinates plot- I understand that it is for
> multivariate data, but I am having a hard time figuring out what it is
> telling me.  Thanks for your help.
> 
In the lattice book, the author mentions that static parallel plots aren't
very useful, in general.

With a lot of data, they tend to be a spaghetti mess. They're more useful
when you can brush over data to highlight it dynamically, which could show
you common patterns. (E.g. that cars with smaller engines tend to have
better mileage, but poorer acceleration.)

At least that's my limited experience with them.

Wikipedia has a page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_coordinates and
the sample graph they have at the top of the page shows data that clusters
on the first 5 features/dimensions, and then goes spaghetti on you. (As the
article says, ordering of the dimensions is important, and they obviously
got a reasonable order... or had boring data.)
-- 
View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/ggplot2-and-lattice-tp19579003p21036174.html
Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com.



More information about the R-help mailing list