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Spider Charts

MikeD_Anderson

Hi!

I've scoured the community and found a couple of old scripts and add-ins on the topic (or related topics) of spider plots. I was wondering if anyone had access to the code mentioned in the kraft customer success story: https://www.jmp.com/en_us/customer-stories/kraft.html. Was that something that they developed without help from our end?

Thoughts?

Accepted answers

ian_jmp

Think you are out of luck. To the best of my knowledge, all of the develoopment for Kraft was done by David Rose in the UK (then a SAS Consultant). He has since moved on, but Robert and/or Phil may have had some more recent contact. He's been to Discovery Europe, for instance.

XanGregg

Mike warned me at Discovery that he was having to field a customer request for a spider plot, even though it's generally a bad visual for analytics. They're not terrible (like a truncated bar chart) -- they're just tricky to read (like a 3D bar chart).

I wrote some about them in a blog post https://community.jmp.com/t5/JMP-Blog/One-less-radar-chart-or-be-square-for-Pi-Day/ba-p/37089 which includes a link to a paper that tested their utility in a user experiment. My example was for a continuous cyclic variable (a true angle), which is argubly the best case for angular plots.

A more common use is for a categorical angle (each angle is a separate variable). In those cases, reading the visual becomes more of a gestalt pattern recognition task: is the overall shape round or spiky or off-center or ...? It may work in some cases with careful variable ordering, but a cartesian graph will work better in general.

Btw, the first comment to my blog post was "how do I make a radar/spider in JMP?"! People like them.

Another comment mentions an add-in Clay made, which may be still useful. https://community.jmp.com/t5/JMP-Scripts/Star-Plot-Script/ta-p/21371#U21371

All comments

ian_jmp

Jeff_Perkinson

I'm curious to hear @XanGregg's thoughts about spider charts and which graph types JMP supports that he thinks are a better visualization and why.

XanGregg

Btw, the first comment to my blog post was "how do I make a radar/spider in JMP?"! People like them.

Another comment mentions an add-in Clay made, which may be still useful. https://community.jmp.com/t5/JMP-Scripts/Star-Plot-Script/ta-p/21371#U21371

MikeD_Anderson

@Jeff_Perkinson: Yeah - I'm not a fan of them, either. But, in the sensory analysis vertical, they are what people are used to looking at. They use them more for @XanGregg's second example (with multiple variables). I'm willing to put in the effort in the short term to get them onto JMP - and then I can start showing them how awful they are :smiling_face_with_horns:. Ultimately, I need to get them onto some of the multivariate visualizations, but this is the first step.

Mark_Bailey

How about this solution?

(Sorry Xan, but you better things to do with your time than code something to shoot down by yourself!)

Mark_Bailey

We forget that we all had to learn how to read plots and graphics just like we had to read words. You learn how to read these plots if you need them. Granted they are not as easy to read or interpret but they work well when you practice.

MikeD_Anderson

Hey, mark! That’s one of the ones I found in the community. I’m working on taking that code and turning it into something that will overlay plots on top of each other.

Best,

M