High-dimensional data visualisation: The textile plot

The textile plot is a parallel coordinate plot in which the ordering, locations and scales of the axes are simultaneously chosen so that the connecting lines, each of which represents a case, are aligned as horizontally as possible. Plots of this type can accommodate numerical data as well as ordered or unordered categorical data, or a mixture of these different data types. Knots and parallel wefts are features of the textile plot which greatly aid the interpretation of the data. Several practical examples are presented which illustrate the potential usefulness of the textile plot as an aid to the interpretation of multivariate data.