Thursday, January 29, 2015

Insignificant figures

Before writing a paper I make lots of figures. Some will be improved upon and included in the paper. Others just help me understand what the data are telling me. Graphical data analysis.
Still others, like this one, end up being rather pointless exercises. This categorizes those barnacle larvae that died during our study, based on the stage during which they died, and whether they spent abnormally long in that stage and/or the previous stage before dying. The reason this is pointless, despite the nice colors and nested boxitude, is that all the same information can more compactly and clearly be displayed in a table. However, I now know how to use, and when not to use, the R package treemap.

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