BiplotGUI: Interactive Biplots in R

The BiplotGUI package homepage

The BiplotGUI package for R makes it easy to construct and interact with biplots.

Biplots

Biplots can be interpreted as graphs in which observations are represented as points while, simultaneously, variables are represented as calibrated biplot axes. Such representations make it easy to visualise multivariate data in two or three dimensions. The biplots of the BiplotGUI package are based on the book by Gower and Hand (1996) and can be thought of as multivariate analogues of the ordinary scatter plot.

Features

A graphical user interface (GUI), making the package easy to use.
Support for different types of biplots (PCA, covariance/correlation, CVA, regression, Procrustes, circular non-linear), both predictive and interpolative.
Support for different scaling techniques (PCO, metric MDS, non-metric MDS, semi-metric MDS).
Various data transformations and distance metrics.
Additional descriptors (convex hulls, alpha-bags, point densities, classification regions).
Intermediate quantities for export back to R.
Diagnostics (graphs of convergence; point, group and axis predictivities; Shepard diagrams).
Interactivity (variable value prediction, zooming, point and axis drag-and-drop, 3D biplots).
Customisable graphics.
The package is free and open-source.

Requirements

R needs to be installed. R 2.10.1 can be downloaded from CRAN .
At present, BiplotGUI runs only in Windows.

Installation

To install the BiplotGUI package and all its dependencies from within R, the following command can be entered at the prompt of the R console: install.packages("BiplotGUI").
Alternatively, BiplotGUI version 0.0-6 can be downloaded from CRAN, and installed manually. The package dependencies (colorspace ,deldir, KernSmooth, MASS, rgl, tcltk, tcltk2, tkrplot ) also need to be installed.

Vignette

Screenshots

Examples

Click here for help, to report bugs, or to download the developement version of the package.

Other biplot packages in R

The calibrations of the calibrate package correspond to those of Gower and Hand (1996), and therefore with those of the BiplotGUI package for linear biplots.

Author

Anthony la Grange

References

Gower JC and Hand DJ (1996). Biplots. Monographs on Statistics and Applied Probability. London, UK: Chapman & Hall.

License

Permission is granted to copy, distributed and/or modify the code of the BiplotGUI package under the terms of the GNU Public License, Version 3 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation .