[R] Displaying Compositional Data With 46 Parts

Jim Lemon drjimlemon at gmail.com
Fri Jul 17 23:54:20 CEST 2015


Hi Rich,
Being in a position of relative ignorance on this topic, I'll offer
some suggestions that may well be useless.

You mention ternary diagrams, which use position to represent
compositional proportions. These will not scale up to 46 values in any
way that I can imagine. If you want to display relative concentration
or the like, differentiate the components and display numeric
information about each component, you may be looking for a variant of
the Hinton diagram. This is a bit like a heatmap where the squares are
of different sizes, representing relative numeric values. In the
Hinton diagram, the colors represent sign (+-), but you would probably
want more complex coloring. Finally, identifying labels and/or values
could be displayed on each cell of the matrix. It would not be too
difficult to program something like this, so if this idea is not
completely useless, let me know.

It is of course possible to go the interactive route and produce a
"play with me" display if necessary.

Jim



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