Solved – What are some popular choices for visualizing 4-dimensional data

data visualizationr

Say I have the following four dimensional data, where first three can be considered as coordinates, and the last one can be considered as values.

c1, c2, c3, value
1, 2, 6, 0.456
34, 34, 12 0.27
12, 1, 66 0.95

How to better visualize the effect of the first three coordinates on the last value?

I're aware of three methods.

One is 3D plot for the first three coordinates with the size of points as the four value. But it is not that easy to see the trend in the data.

Another is using a series of 3D plot, each of which is with a coordinate fixed.
enter image description here

Another one may be a socalled "trellis graphs" in lattice of R. Not sur eif it is for this purpose but it seems so.
enter image description here

Best Answer

If the first three are just spatial coordinates and the data are sparse you can simply do a 3D scatter plot with differently sized or colored points for the value.

Looks something like this: Scatter
(source: gatech.edu)

If your data is intended to be continuous in nature and exists on a lattice grid, you can plot several isocontours of the data using Marching Cubes.

Another approach when you have dense 4D data is to display several 2D "slices" of the data embedded in 3D. It will look something like this:

Slices