RankingProject

The Ranking Project: Visualizations for Comparing Populations


License
GPL-2.0

Documentation

The Ranking Project: Visualizations for Comparing Populations

Travis build status CRAN downloads

The package RankingProject is a companion for the articles “A Primer on Visualizations for Comparing Populations, Including the Issue of Overlapping Confidence Intervals” (Wright, Klein, and Wieczorek, 2019, The American Statistician) and “A Joint Confidence Region for an Overall Ranking of Populations” (Klein, Wright, and Wieczorek, 2020, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series C).

The package provides functions for plotting ranked tables of data side-by-side with their plots. The available visualizations include shaded columns plots, adjusted confidence intervals, and related plots intended for making correct inferences about one-to-many or many-to-many comparisons.

Installation

Either install from CRAN:

install.packages("RankingProject")

Or install the latest development version from GitHub:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("civilstat/RankingProject",
                         build_vignettes = TRUE)

To exactly replicate figures from the paper, following the vignettes, you will also need the tikzDevice package:

# install.packages("tikzDevice")

Example

library(RankingProject)

# Load dataset of mean travel time (in minutes) to work
# of workers 16 years and over who did not work at home,
# from the 2011 American Community Survey (ACS)
data(TravelTime2011)
USdata <- TravelTime2011
head(USdata)
#>   Rank        State Estimate.2dec SE.2dec Abbreviation  Region FIPS
#> 1    1 South Dakota         16.86    0.28           SD MIDWEST   46
#> 2    2 North Dakota         16.91    0.36           ND MIDWEST   38
#> 3    3     Nebraska         18.06    0.19           NE MIDWEST   31
#> 4    4      Wyoming         18.10    0.50           WY    WEST   56
#> 5    5      Montana         18.18    0.32           MT    WEST   30
#> 6    6       Alaska         18.39    0.33           AK PACIFIC    2

# Format estimates and SEs into strings with 2 digits past the decimal
USdata$Estimate.Print = formatC(USdata$Estimate.2dec,
                                format = 'f', digits = 2)
# For SEs, also drop the leading 0
USdata$SE.Print = substring(formatC(USdata$SE.2dec,
                                    format = 'f', digits = 2),
                            first = 2)

# Set Colorado as the reference area
refAbbr <- "CO"
refRow  <- which(USdata$Abbreviation==refAbbr)

# Set up parameter lists for table function and plot function
tableParList <- with(USdata,
                     list(ranks = Rank, names = State,
                          est = Estimate.Print, se = SE.Print,
                          placeType = "State"))
plotParList <- with(USdata,
                      list(est = Estimate.2dec, se = SE.2dec,
                           names = Abbreviation, refName = refAbbr,
                           confLevel = .9, cex = 0.6, thetaLine = 1.5,
                           plotType = "difference", lwdBold = 2))

# Plot demi-Bonferroni-corrected 90% CIs
# for the differences between Colorado and each other state,
# alongside a ranking table
RankPlotWithTable(tableParList = tableParList, plotParList = plotParList)

References

Almond, R.G., Lewis, C., Tukey, J.W., and Yan, D. (2000). “Displays for Comparing a Given State to Many Others,” The American Statistician, vol. 54, no. 2, 89-93, DOI:10.1080/00031305.2000.10474517.

Klein, M., Wright, T., and Wieczorek, J. (2020). “A Joint Confidence Region for an Overall Ranking of Populations,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series C, vol. 69, no. 3, 589-606, DOI:10.1111/rssc.12402.

Wright, T., Klein, M., and Wieczorek, J. (2019). “A Primer on Visualizations for Comparing Populations, Including the Issue of Overlapping Confidence Intervals,” The American Statistician, vol. 73, no. 2, 165-178, DOI:10.1080/00031305.2017.1392359.