Parallel Sets

Parallel sets first published by Robert Kosara in

Kosara, Robert, Fabian Bendix, and Helwig Hauser. “Parallel sets: Interactive exploration and visual analysis of categorical data.” Visualization and Computer Graphics, IEEE Transactions on 12.4 (2006): 558-568.

provide a compelling interactive method for visualizing categorical data. Jason Davies, co-author of d3.js, implemented an extremely well-designed d3 version of parallel sets. Using the infrastructure provided by htmlwidgets, this package parsetR allows us to easily integrate parallel sets into our R workflow.

Installation

parsetR is not on CRAN, so please install using devtools::install_github().

devtools::install_github("timelyportfolio/parsetR")

Usage

With table

In this first iteration, parsetR is designed to work with tables from R, such as the built-in Titanic dataset.

library(parsetR)
## Loading required package: vcdExtra
## Loading required package: vcd
## Loading required package: grid
## Loading required package: gnm
parset(Titanic, width = "80%", height = 400)

Here is another example with the UCBAdmissions data, and we’ll make the lines curvy with the tension argument.

library(parsetR)

parset(UCBAdmissions, tension = 0.5, width = "80%", height = 400)

With data.frame

With a data.frame you’ll need to tell parsetR where to find the numeric column for now. Otherwise, it will appear as a dimension. as shown below.

# demonstrate working with non-table
data(Alligator, package="vcdExtra")
# with data.frame to demo how it doesn't work
parset(Alligator, width = "80%", height = 400)

I thought it be fun to force a little JavaScript to specify our numeric value. I will eventually provide a more R-like interface, but for now please learn this tiny bit of JS :).

parset(
  Alligator,
  # dimensions are the categorical columns
  dimensions = colnames(Alligator)[-5],
  # use some JavaScript to inform parset that Freq has the value
  value = htmlwidgets::JS("function(d){return d.count}"),
  width = "80%", height = 400
)

Feedback

parsetR was implemented in a couple of hours to provide a base for feedback, criticism, comments. Please help me make this thing as good as it should be.