Abstract #300564

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JSM 2003 Abstract #300564
Activity Number: 284
Type: Topic Contributed
Date/Time: Tuesday, August 5, 2003 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
Sponsor: Section on Statistical Graphics
Abstract - #300564
Title: Visualizing Categorical Data Arising in the Health Sciences
Author(s): Matthias Schonlau*+
Companies: RAND Corporation
Address: 1700 Main St., Santa Monica, CA, 90401-3208,
Keywords: graph ; visualization ; cluster analysis ; stata software ; categorical data
Abstract:

I will present two new graphs. The "hammock plot" is useful for visualizing categorical data. The graph takes elements from both Mosaic plots and parallel coordinate plots. It borrows the idea of representing a category by an area from Mosaic plots, and the arrangement of the variables is similar to that of parallel coordinate plots. Unlike parallel coordinate plots hammock plots also has a univariate descriptor adjacent to any two parallel coordinates. Hammock plots are particularly useful in detecting coding errors and for examining missing values across several variables. The second graph, the "clustergram" (www.schonlau.net/clustergram.html) is useful for visualizing the results of hierarchical and nonhierarchical cluster analyses. In that sense clustergrams and dendrogram graphs have similar objectives; however, dendrograms can only be constructed for hierarchical cluster analyses. I discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the proposed graphs with datasets from the health sciences.

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