Fully Three-dimensional Radial Visualization
This work provides a tool for data analysts and researchers to better visualize complex multivariate data, though it is incremental as it builds on existing 2D radial visualization methods.
The authors tackled the problem of visualizing multidimensional datasets by extending radial visualization from two to three dimensions, developing RadViz3D with anchor points on a sphere, and demonstrated improved fidelity in displaying simulated and real datasets like crabs and wine.
We develop methodology for three-dimensional (3D) radial visualization (RadViz) of multidimensional datasets. The classical two-dimensional (2D) RadViz visualizes multivariate data in the 2D plane by mapping every observation to a point inside the unit circle. Our tool, RadViz3D, distributes anchor points uniformly on the 3D unit sphere. We show that this uniform distribution provides the best visualization with minimal artificial visual correlation for data with uncorrelated variables. However, anchor points can be placed exactly equi-distant from each other only for the five Platonic solids, so we provide equi-distant anchor points for these five settings, and approximately equi-distant anchor points via a Fibonacci grid for the other cases. Our methodology, implemented in the R package $radviz3d$, makes fully 3D RadViz possible and is shown to improve the ability of this nonlinear technique in more faithfully displaying simulated data as well as the crabs, olive oils and wine datasets. Additionally, because radial visualization is naturally suited for compositional data, we use RadViz3D to illustrate (i) the chemical composition of Longquan celadon ceramics and their Jingdezhen imitation over centuries, and (ii) US regional SARS-Cov-2 variants' prevalence in the Covid-19 pandemic during the summer 2021 surge of the Delta variant.