st: RE: mosaic plot with an intensity dimension

[Nick Cox <n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk>]

-spineplot- is from SJ. Please remember to explain _where_ user-written programs you refer to come from. 

I don't think the literature on graphics is encouraging on quantitative decoding of colour intensity. Either way, as you know, -spineplot- does not support what you want directly. 

An alternative plot that is quite easy to arrange, but may or may not work well, is 

egen group = group(y x), label
spineplot z group 

Nick 
n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk 

Dimitriy V. Masterov

I would am trying to create the graph of customer data where y is
categorical customer type (4 integer values), x is binary new customer
variable, and z is a binary purchased or not variable. I would like to
create a mosaic plot of y and x to show the sizes of the groups, but
somehow express the percentage of customers who purchase the product
for each group using color intensity. I want to show that some group
has a really high purchase rate, but they are a small fraction of the
customers. Right now I do this with user-written spineplot using the
text option:

bys type new_cust: egen mean=mean(reorder_90)
replace mean=mean*100
gen mean2=string(mean, "%4.0f")
spineplot type new_cust, text(mean2) percent

This uses numbers rather than color intensity, and is harder to read
or to see patterns, at least for my brain. A rough example of what I
want to see is http://newsmap.jp, where the color intensity indicates
the number of related articles.

Is there a way of expressing the mean with color intensity? Is there a
better way of visualizing this data?

*
*   For searches and help try:
*   http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?search
*   http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
*   http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/