Incomer per person (x axis) correlates with life expectancy (y axis).
These two indicators change over time (z axis).
x correlates with y. Moreover, x and y both correlate with z.
The question is: what kind of plot should I use to visualize this? Maybe a 3D scatter plot?
Best Answer
A three-dimensional scatter plot is good, but can sometimes be hard to interpret because you lose a dimension of information when you project it onto the two-dimensional page.
An alternative is to do multiple two-dimensional scatter plots. This is equivalent to making a three-dimensional plot and then looking at it from different angles. For example, in R you can generate some data using
and collect it together into a single data frame object
You can generate the sample correlation matrix with
and finally generate the set of two-dimensional scatter plots