Visualizing Z variable using color

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Before you play with color, pick your z-variable:



Using Color to Visualize the z variable:

If you add a categorical Z variable to a dot plot, histogram or a bar chart it will color the data points according to the category. This can help you see visually if there is a correlation between the Z variable and the others.

Dot plot

Here is an example of the same graph, but two different z-variable types:

  • Categorical -  Character Gender has two values, F and and is represented by two distinct colors
  • Numeric - age difference creates a scale of color to represent the numerical values. 

Histogram

In the histogram case (numerical X, categorical Z) the histogram will be divided up into colored bars according to the Z variable:

This is actually grouping by Z

As the histogram has no other way to show the Z variable, this is actually a case of grouping by Z and will also mean that separate descriptive stats can be shown for each group. See this article about grouping by Z.

Frequency Plot

For a bar frequency plot (categorical X, categorical Z) it again splits the bars by the Z variable:

Customizing colors

In the examples above, the colors have been chosen from an automatic scale that ensures a good contrast. However, you might want to select the colors yourself. This can be done in the Values dialog for the column (located within the column header):


This opens the Values dialog, that allows to you set colors (and labels) for each categorical value:

See also

Setting a DataMoji for each categorical value - see here

Grouping data by a Z variable