Linkspotter

Exploratory analysis tool

Linkspotter is a package of R software that allows to calculate and visualize using a graph all the bivariate links of a dataset.

Its main features are:

  • calculation of several correlation matrices corresponding to different link coefficients.
  • clustering of variables using an unsupervised learning.
  • supervised discretization of one or a couple of variables.

It also offers a customizable user interface, allowing to:

  • Visualize the links using a graph (the variables correspond to the nodes and the links correspond to the edges)
  • View the distribution of each variable using its histogram or barplot
  • Visualize a link between a couple of variables using scatter plots, box plots, etc.
  • Pearson’s r
  • Spearman’s rho
  • Kendall’s tau
  • the Maximal Information Coefficient (MIC)
  • the distance correlation
  • the Maximal Normalized Mutual Information (MaxNMI)

The MaxNMI is a bivariate link coefficient, which uses a supervised discretization called Best Equal-Frequency Discretization (BeEF). Both are introduced by Linkspotter. The interest of this new link coefficient is that it enables to assess and compare the link between a couple of variables, whatever their types (quantitative vs qualitative, quantitative vs quantitative, qualitative vs qualitative).

Linkspotter uses and combines some features coming from other R packages, namely infotheo, minerva, energy, mclust, Hmisc, shiny, visNetwork and rAmCharts.