Local Projective Display of Multivariate Numerical Data

Abstract

For displaying multivariate numerical data on a 2D plane by the projection, principal components biplot and the GGobi are two main tools of data visualization. The biplot is very useful for capturing the global shape of the dataset, by representing $n$ observations and $p$ variables simultaneously on a single graph. The GGobi shows a dynamic movie of the images of $n$ observations projected onto a sequence of unit vectors floating on the $p$-dimensional sphere. Even though these two methods are certainly very valuable, there are drawbacks. The biplot is too condensed to describe the detailed parts of the data, and the GGobi is too burdensome for ordinary data analyses. In this paper, “the local projective display(LPD)” is proposed for visualizing multivariate numerical data. Main steps of the LDP are 1) $k$-means clustering of the data into $k$ subsets, 2) drawing $k$ principal components biplots of individual subsets, and 3) sequencing $k$ plots by Hurley’s (2004) endlink algorithm for cognitive continuity.