Data visualization tours are a class of linear projections that are animate small rotations in the basis over time. This is akin to a shadow puppet, or a 3D object being slowly rotated as the 2D shadow is being watched. In the same way a tour watches a 2D scatterplot at the p-dimensional data object is being rotated.
This extends the number of dimensions that we can view in data-space! This is applicable to many visualizations across all disciplines. We know that going to numerical summarization alone is dangerous. We need look no further than Anscomb’s quartet.
Such visualizations are applicable to numeric matrices scaling well into 10’s of variables. If the variables are numerous PCA initialization may be useful to reduce the intrinsic dimensionality. Continuous quantitative variables are preferred, although ordinal discrete variables are also regularly used. Mapping color and/or shape to a (supervised) class tends to be helpful.
The tourr R package implements grand tours (constrained random walks in the basis), projection pursuit (basis anneals to some objective function), and several other variants and options of visualization tours.
The work and contribution of spinifex are primarily two-fold. The addition of manual tours which allow for user defined (and interactive!) control of the basis. Secondly, the extension to gganimate and plotly graphics packages, which allow for more control over display and exploring .gif and .html widgets of tours. The later can also consume tours produced in tourr!
Latest CRAN version:
install.packages("spinifex")Latest development version:
remotes::install_github("nspyrison/spinifex")library("spinifiex") ## Load into session
vignette("getting started with spinifex") ## Introduction to tours and spinifex
vignette("ggproto_api") ## Introduction to the new ggproto api
run_app("radial_tour") ## Run a local shiny app, demonstrating radial manual tours
help(package = "spinifex") ## Review the package contents and documentationPlease submit bug reports, errors, and feature requests to https://github.com/nspyrison/spinifex/issues