Graphics and statistics for cardiology: comparing categorical and continuous variables

Graphs are a standard tool for succinctly describing data, and play a crucial role supporting statistical analyses of that data. However, all too often, graphical display of data in submitted manuscripts is either inappropriate for the task at hand or poorly executed, requiring revision prior to publication. To assist authors, in this paper, we present several forms of graph, for data typically seen in Heart, including dot charts, violin plots, histograms and boxplots for quantitative data, and mosaic plots and bar charts for categorical data. Justification for using these specific plots is drawn from the literature on visual perception; we also provide software instruction and examples, using various popular packages.

[1]  Bang Wong,et al.  Points of view: Plotting symbols , 2013, Nature Methods.

[2]  Heike Hofmann,et al.  Let Graphics Tell the Story - Datasets in R , 2013 .

[3]  Wenyaw Chan,et al.  Statistical Methods in Medical Research , 2013, Model. Assist. Stat. Appl..

[4]  R. Dawson How Significant is a Boxplot Outlier? , 2011 .

[5]  D. Freedman,et al.  On The So-Called “Huber Sandwich Estimator” and “Robust Standard Errors” , 2006 .

[6]  Ian Spence,et al.  No Humble Pie: The Origins and Usage of a Statistical Chart , 2005 .

[7]  Ronnie Driver,et al.  Biostatistics: a Methodology for the Health Sciences , 2005 .

[8]  Andrew Gelman,et al.  Let's Practice What We Preach , 2002 .

[9]  Steff Lewis,et al.  Forest plots: trying to see the wood and the trees , 2001, BMJ : British Medical Journal.

[10]  Stefan Sperlich,et al.  Generalized Additive Models , 2014 .

[11]  Joachim Meyer,et al.  Information Structure and the Relative Efficacy of Tables and Graphs , 1999, Hum. Factors.

[12]  Carolina Cruz-Neira,et al.  XGobi vs the C2: Results of an experiment comparing data visualization in a 3-D immersive virtual reality environment with a 2-D workstation display , 1999, Comput. Stat..

[13]  J. Hintze,et al.  Violin plots : A box plot-density trace synergism , 1998 .

[14]  S. Greenland Dose‐Response and Trend Analysis in Epidemiology: Alternatives to Categorical Analysis , 1995, Epidemiology.

[15]  M. Friendly Mosaic Displays for Multi-Way Contingency Tables , 1994 .

[16]  L. Fisher,et al.  Biostatistics: A Methodology for the Health Sciences , 1993 .

[17]  Stephen R. Ellis,et al.  Pictorial Communication: Pictures and the Synthetic Universe , 1991 .

[18]  M. Braga,et al.  Exploratory Data Analysis , 2018, Encyclopedia of Social Network Analysis and Mining. 2nd Ed..

[19]  W. Cleveland,et al.  Graphical Perception: Theory, Experimentation, and Application to the Development of Graphical Methods , 1984 .

[20]  Beat Kleiner,et al.  Graphical Methods for Data Analysis , 1983 .

[21]  W. Cleveland Robust Locally Weighted Regression and Smoothing Scatterplots , 1979 .