Density Distribution Sunflower Plots in Stata Version 8

William Dupont (william.dupont@vumc.org)

North American Stata Users' Group Meetings 2004 from Stata Users Group

Abstract: Density distribution sunflower plots are used to display high-density bivariate data. They are useful for data where a conventional scatter plot is difficult to read due to overstriking of the plot symbol. The x-y plane is subdivided into a lattice of regular hexagonal bins of width w specified by the user. The user also specifies the values of l, d, and k that affect the plot as follows. Individual observations are plotted when there are less than l observations per bin as in a conventional scatter plot. Each bin with from l to d observations contains a light sunflower. Other bins contain a dark sunflower. In a light sunflower each petal represents one observation. In a dark sunflower, each petal represents k observations. The user can control the sizes and colors of the sunflowers. By selecting appropriate colors and sizes for the light and dark sunflowers, plots can be obtained that give both the overall sense of the data density distribution as well as the number of data points in any given region. The use of this graphic is illustrated with data from the Framingham Heart Study. Stata version 8.2 contains a program, called sunflower, that draws these graphs.

Date: 2004-07-15
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cmp
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://repec.org/nasug2004/Sunflower.pdf presentation slides (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:boc:asug04:11

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in North American Stata Users' Group Meetings 2004 from Stata Users Group Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christopher F Baum (baum@bc.edu).