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Mosaic plot

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Mosaic plot
This type of plot is used to visualise contingency tables by proportionally representing the size of the cells. It can also be used to visualise the fit of the log-linear model technique. The example shows a three dimensional table with data of hair, eye colour and gender in 592 statistics students.
Visual types
Level of expertise
Source:
Friendly, M. (1992), Mosaic displays for loglinear models. Proceedings of the Statistical Graphics Section, American Statistical Association.: pages 61–68 (Visualisation information web site)
http://addictedtor.free.fr/graphiques/RGraphGallery.php?graph=94
Interactive features
None
Benefits & pitfalls to avoid
  • When using colours to portray data values or types, ensure that the colors used are accessible to all users. Online tools such as ColorBrewer (www.colorbrewer.org) can help identify issues with colours used.
Create your own
  • Area charts can be created in a range of standard data applications such as Excel.
  • A Treemap is a visualisation of hierarchical structure. You can upload data to online tools such as Many Eyes to create interactive Treemaps. However, we are not aware of any standard desktop tools that can be used to create Treemaps (please email if you know of anything!).