Dr Catherine Hurley, National University of Ireland, Maynooth

Composition of statistical graphics: a graph-throretic perspective

Visualization methods are crucial in data exploration, presentation and modelling.  A carefully chosen graphic reveals information about the data, assisting the viewer in comparing and relating variables, cases, groups, clusters ormodel fits.  A statistical graphic is composed of display components whose arrangement (in space or time) facilitates thses comparisons.  In this presentation, we take a graph-theoretic prespective ot the graphical layout problem.  The basic idea is that graphical layouts are essentially traversals of appropriately constructed mathematical graphs.  We explore the construction of familiar scatterplot matrices and parallel coordinate displays from this perspective.  We present graph traversal algorithms tailored to the graphical layout prolem.  Novel applications range from a new display for pairwise comparison of treatment groups, to a guided parallel coordinate display and on to a road map for dynamic exploration of high-dimensional data.