Interactive Parallel Coordinates Plot Based on Qt

• Activity Number: 335
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 2, 2011 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistical Graphics
• Author(s): Yihui Xie*+
• Companies: Iowa State University
• Keywords: interactive graphics ; parallel coordinates plot ; Qt ; cranvas

Abstract

The parallel coordinates (par-coords) plot is a common way to visualize high-dimensional data. There have been a number of dynamic statistical graphics systems such as GGobi and Mondrian, in which we can operate par-coords plots interactively. In this paper, we introduce the par-coords plots in a new graphics package cranvas; it is based on the R packages qtbase and qtpaint, which are API's to Nokia's Qt toolkit through R. The par-coords plot in cranvas has both traditional and novel features; for example, we can draw the par-coords plot on top of the corresponding boxplots, manually reorder the axes, and brush the lines in real time, besides, we also have built-in capabilities to impute missing values, automatically reorder the axes by multi-dimensional scaling or ANOVA, and center the axes by the means or medians, etc. Common brushing modes like union, intersection and complement enable us to conveniently query the data using plots. Finally we will give examples based on the data of NRC rankings for statistics departments in the United States.