The term spineplot has been applied over the last decade or so to a type of bar chart used particularly for showing frequencies, proportions, or percentages of two cross-classified categorical variables. The principle is that the areas of rectangular tiles are proportional to the frequencies in the cells of a contingency table. Often both coarse and fine structure are easy to see, including departures from independence. The main idea has, in fact, been rediscovered repeatedly over at least the last 130 years. In its most general form, it has been widely publicized under the name mosaic plots. This column introduces, discusses, and exemplifies a Stata implementation of spineplots. It is noted that a restriction to two variables is more apparent than real, as either axis of a spineplot can show a composite variable defined by cross combinations of two or more variables.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Article provided by StataCorp LP in its journal Stata Journal.
Volume (Year): 8 (2008) Issue (Month): 1 (February) Pages: 105-121 Download reference. The following formats are available: HTML
(with abstract),
plain text
(with abstract),
BibTeX,
RIS (EndNote, RefMan, ProCite),
ReDIF