So, how do you display five variables at once in a single 2-d graph? This TED talk has been around for awhile, but it’s worth a second look.

Hans Rosling uses UN statistics to show how “third world” countries have caught up to the rest of world in terms of small birth rates and long lives. What is so impressive about visualizing data this way is that it easily displays 5 different interacting variables:

• Fertility: x-axis
• Life Expectancy: y-axis
• Population: bubble size
• World Region: bubble color
• Year: time

And, arguably, a 6th variable could be included, because on the Gapminder.org website, the country being plotted is available on mouse-over.

Because this method of data presentation is so visually striking, the next question is, can this be done in R? Well, apparently yes. Yihui Xie created an R package that lets analysts save individual plots as a GIF file, and then combine those as animation frames using ImageMagick to create a single animated GIF.

Haven’t tried this out yet, but stay tuned. The main issue will be whether or not this package, and specifically the ImageMagick animated GIF conversion, is compatible with the ggplot2 graphics package. If so, this will be an amazing tool for analysts to show how variables evolve over time, or with respect to any other third variable of interest.

Welcome!

Welcome to InquiSTAT!  This site was hacked together using the Beauty Wordpress theme as a template. I used this excellent post from the GreatWebGuy blog to get things started.

This gave step by step instructions on how to do rapid Wordpress theme development using Java, Eclipse, and XAMPP Lite, along with pointers to the other plug-ins that need to be downloaded and installed. This setup allows the developer to start and stop an Apache web server and MySQL database from within Eclipse, which lets a Wordpress blog run locally.

With GIMP, the GNU Image Manipulation Program, this setup allowed image files to be dropped directly into Eclipse and view the new look and feel with a simple browser refresh. Pretty cool.