Category: Visualization

Alan Haynes shows how to build flow charts in R using the grid Gmisc packages:

Flow charts are an important part of a clinical trial report. Making them can be a pain though. One good way to do it seems to be with the grid and Gmisc packages in R. X and Y coordinates can be designated based on the center of the boxes in normalized device coordinates (proportions of the device space – 0.5 is this middle) which saves a lot of messing around with corners of boxes and arrows.

A very basic flow chart, based very roughly on the CONSORT version, can be generated as follows…

Click through for sample code and a resulting image.  H/T R-bloggers

Andrea Cirillo takes inspiration from the great works to build palettes:

If you see this painting you will find a profound of colours with a great equilibrium between different hues, the hardy usage of complementary colours and the ability expressed in the “chiaroscuro” technique. While I was looking at the painting I started, wondering how we moved from this wisdom to the ugly charts you can easily find within today’s corporate reports ( find a great sample on the WTF visualization website)

This is where Paletter comes from: bring the Renaissance wisdom and beauty within the plots we produce every day.

Introducing paletter

PaletteR is a lean R package which lets you draw from any custom image an optimized palette of colours. The package extracts a custom number of representative colours from the image. Let’s try to apply it on the “Vergine con il Bambino, angeli e Santi” before looking into its functional specification.

It’s an interesting package.  I’ll have to play around with it.

Lea Waniek walks us through coordinate systems in ggplot2:

The coordinate system can be manipulated by adding one of ggplot’s different coordinate systems. When you are imagining a coordinate system, you are most likely thinking of a Cartesian one. The Cartesian coordinate system combines x and y dimension orthogonally and is ggplots default (coord_cartesian).

There also are several varaitions of the familiar Cartesian coordinate system in ggplot, namely coord_fixed, coord_flip and coord_trans. For all of them, the displayed section of the data can be specified by defining the maximal value depicted on the x (xlim =) and y (ylim =) axis. This allows to “zoom in” or “zoom out” of a plot. It is a great advantage, that all manipulations of the coordinate system only alter the depiction of the data but not the data itself.

I tend to avoid polar coordinates, but that’s mostly because I don’t work in a space which benefits from it.

Laura Ellis shows how to use the ggmap package to create choropleth maps in R:

In the last map, it was a bit tricky to see the density of the incidents because all the graphed points were sitting on top of each other.  In this scenario, we are going to make the data all one color and we are going to set the alpha variable which will make the dots transparent.  This helps display the density of points plotted.

Also note, we can re-use the base map created in the first step “p” to plot the new map.

Check it out.  This is an introduction to creating choropleths, making it a good start.

Marlon Ribunal has a quick example showing how to build faceted plots with SQL Server ML Services and ggplot2:

In my previous post, I have demonstrated how easy it is to create a bar graph in SQL Server 2017 In-Database Machine Learning using  R.

We’re going to build upon that basic graph.

Sometimes doing data analysis would require us to look at an overview of our data across specific partitions, say a year. For example, we want to see how our product groups fare on month-to-month basis across the last 4 years.

In a data analytics perspective, there are quite a handful of data points in this requirement – data aggregate (quantity), monthly periods, and year partitions.

One of the approaches to handle such requirement is by using a facet. Faceting is a way of plotting subsets of data into a matrix of panels based on one or more variables – or facets.

Click through for the example and code.  Facets are quite useful, but they run the risk of misleading if you squeeze too many onto the screen.  The same line can look quite different with a “tall” facet versus a “wide” facet, and that can change how people interpret your visual.

Faisal Atakora shows how to build a forest plot using ggplot2:

To build a Forest Plot often the forestplot package is used in R. However, I find the ggplot2 to have more advantages in making Forest Plots, such as enable inclusion of several variables with many categories in a lattice form. You can also use any scale of your choice such as log scale etc. In this post, I will introduce how to plot Risk Ratios and their Confidence Intervals of several conditions.

Click through for the script.  You might also want to compare it to the forestplot package to see how these differ.