cpsievert
commented
8 years ago This issue hits close to home for me. My first real experience developing interactive graphics was LDAvis -- a tool for interpreting topic models (i.e., quickly exploring a high-dimensional model). Although that approach (coding in HTML/JS/D3js) is super flexible, it has too high of a learning curve and time investment to be generally useful for data analysts. This problem motivates my work on animint and plotly.
plotly has nice support for zooming, panning, and identification (i.e., tooltips), which could be helpful in the issues you describe. I also like the idea of providing more customized interfaces tailored to certain classes of models. I'd love to talk/brainstorm with folks that have ideas about what types of things they'd like to show and maybe we can make it a reality :)
jesse-jesse
CourtneyCampany
mdsumner
So a little while ago I put together
shist(), kind of on a lark. It's an interactive histogram with a slider to set the bins. I blogged about on the BRAG one weiRd tip site.I realise the idea is not original, but it does beg the question: can we provide a better user experience than static images for the common workhorse plots and diagnostics that modellers use all the time?
A good example is the residuals vs fits plot for generalised linear models. When a troublesome point calls out to you, you should be able to interrogate it with your mouse to get the metrics that indicate its leverage. Not waste time creating another plot for that. It might even give you the data (or index), because it's highly likely that's the next thing you want to know.
Bayesians aren't left out by any means: I rarely see an [MCMC trace](MCMC trace) that doesn't look like an amplitude plot for an audio file on soundcloud. For this to be of any real use I reckon it needs to be zoomable and scrubbable. The autocorrelation plots would probably likewise benefit from some opportunity to filter down to a selectable window of samples.
You all probably have your own key plots for your respective disciplines, the ones you read about in the handbook. I'd bet they can be improved with a bit of a redesign incorporating the interactive elements we have at our fingertips thanks to the likes of shiny, ggvis, plotly et. al. It wouldn't take much work to get a few of these together into a package that could have a pretty high impact.