– this page as pdf –
  
About 
Mondrian is a general purpose statistical data-visualization system. It features outstanding visualization techniques for data of almost any kind, and has its particular strength compared to other tools when working with Categorical Data, Geographical Data and LARGE Data.

All plots in Mondrian are fully linked, and offer various interactions and queries. Any case selected in a plot in Mondrian is highlighted in all other plots.

Currently implemented plots comprise Mosaic Plot, Scatterplots and SPLOM, Maps, Barcharts, Histograms, Missing Value Plot, Parallel Coordinates/Boxplots and  Boxplots y by x.

Mondrian works with data in standard tab-delimited or comma-separated ASCII files and can load data from R workspaces. There is basic support for working directly on data in Databases (please contact me for further info).

Mondrian is written in JAVA and is distributed as native application (wrapper) for MacOS X and Windows. Linux users need to start the jar-file. The latest version can be downloaded here.

For questions please refer to mondrian@theusRus.de. Bugs may be submitted to the  bug-tracker as well as per e-mail.

News:

  • (01/25/10) Version 1.1 is out. The major change is the ability to load dataframes directly from R workspace files into Mondrian, simply by choosing the desired dataframe.
            The color scheme has been improved (i) the color brushing colors are taken from the color brewer and (ii) there is a general scheme called "Daltonian" for those in need.
            Furthermore this version works seamlessly with Java 6 on all platforms, improves queries in PCPs once again and fixes several bugs and adds minor feature requests.
    (Filed bugs fixed since last release: 4, 27, 41, 44, 69, 75, 77, 78, 103, 112, 113, 114)

  • (12/22/09) The newsletter article slipped in, such that version 1.1 is now sheduled for January - Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!!

  • (09/10/09) The slides which go with the book "Interactive Graphics for Data Analysis – Principles and Examples" can now be found on the web.
    They should be a fruitful resource for everybody who wants to learn how to use Mondrian.
  • (10/21/08) Finally "the Book" is out.

    It covers a 30 page manual on Mondrian and nine real world case studies in the second part of the book. The first part introduces the most important concepts to get the most out of a tool like Mondrian.

    See www.interactivegraphics.org for more information.
Book
  • (05/24/07) we have a Bugzilla based bug-tracker online. Please submit all bug reports and requests there - feel free to e-mail after submission as well ...


 

 Plots

Mosaic Plot 
Mosaic plots in Mondrian are fully interactive. Interactivity includes the standard operation as described in the convention section (except zooming), plus the reordering of the variables in the plot by using the 4 arrow keys. Use <meta>-r to rotate the direction along which the last variable in the plot is split.

Use <meta>-+ and <meta>-- to add and delete interactions during the modeling process using the ModelNavigator. During the model process one may want to use the plot option to show the expected values of the model and not the observed.

The picture below shows an example of the Titanic dataset, which includes information on the class (1,2,3 crew) age (child, adult) and gender (male, female) of the passengers. Surviving passengers are highlight.



Mosaic

Although there are no labels to decode the cells, the order of the variables is given in the title of the window. Using the interactive interrogation it is very easy to query the cells. In this static representation the knowledge of the fact that there are no children and hardly any women in the crew, should be sufficient to decode the plot.



rotated mosaic plot
Example of a rotated Mosaic plot, i.e. first variable is split along y not x!
 


Additionally Mondrian features 4 variations of mosaic plots. The Figures below show the same data from the cars data set, in all five possible variations. Use the pop-up menu for the plot options:
Standard
Observed values
Expected values
(according to current model)
Same bin size
 
Fluctuation diagram
These plots show the five different variations of Mosaic plots. Whereas the first two options are "real" Mosaic plots, the other three versions (same bin size, fluctuation diagram and multiple barchart) are more useful to handle only a few variables with many categories, which is the worst case to handle for a standard Mosaic plot.

For the latter three cases, Mondrian plots the category labels for the first two variables, since the categories are equally spaced and thus can be placed decently.

By typing shift-up-arrow and shift-down-arrow, the size of boxes can be zoomed. As soon as a box reaches its maximum size, it is red-framed to indicate the incorrect size. Note that in the same bin size display all boxes have a red frame, because their sizes do not correspond to any group count.
Multiple barcharts





Barcharts 
Barcharts in Mondrian follow a vertical layout, not a horizontal layout. Thus the level-names can be printed in full length.

Besides standard selection and interrogation techniques, interactivity in a barchart comprises:

  • Reordering of levels via drag & drop (use <alt>-click on a bar or its text to drag)
    (Dropping between categories inserts, dropping on categories exchanges)
  • Switch between proportional width and height 
  • Sort levels by 
    • frequency
    • name 
    • absolute highlighting 
    • relative highlighting
  • Reverse current order 
Since barcharts are scrollable, they may hold any arbitrary number of categories


barchart

A barchart for the dataset on the Titanic passengers. First class passenger are highlighted. 






When a barchart has very many categories, it can be pretty painful to search particular items, especially if the barchart is sorted to something else than lexicographical order. As used from lists in many applications, you may now type a prefix of the item you are looking for, and Mondrian will automatically scroll to that item.
(The same behavior can be found in the variables window - plus additional selection of the hits)




Missing
Value Plot

If the dataset has missing values, a missing value plot can be used to analyze the structure of the missing values (monotone missingness etc.).
MVP

The options of the
missing value plot are similar to those of a barchart (sorting etc.)

Missing values MUST BE CODED AS "NA"!!




Maps 
Whenever a dataset provides information on polygons, Mondrian can draw interactive maps of this geographical reference. 

A corresponding data record must be provided for each polygon defined in the dataset. Different polygons might point to the same data record, but multiple records to a set of polygons are ignored.

Maps offer the standard selection and interrogation techniques. Additionally the standard zooming function of Mondrian is enabled.

All maps have a popup-menu at the top to create a choropleth map of any of the variables; including alphanumerical variables.
Further options include:

  • Color schemes
    • "white to black"
    • "red"
    • "green"
    • "blue"
    • "blue to red"
    • "blue to white to red"
    • if R and Rserve are installed
      • "heat"
      • "terrain"
      • "topo"
  • Invert color scheme
  • Assign color linearly, normalized, or by rank
  • Limit minimum or maximum to a specific value


Map gray
map green
grayscale green color scheme
map blue to red
map normalized
blue to red color scheme normalized blue to red color scheme
blue to white to red
blue to white to red with limiter
normalized blue to white to red scheme linear blue to white to red with limit to 30

Six choropleth maps of the five Midwest states, shaded according to educational status



The saturation (more precise the alpha) of boundaries can now be changed with the right arrow key (more saturation) and left arror key (less saturation).
This can change the perception of the map drastically, so make sure to test it out!

US County Map with full saturation:
Map saturated

US County Map with reduced boundaries:
Map light
Note the extreme difference of the maps! (We call this technique map-martinizing…)




Parallel 
Coordinates 

Mondrian implements parallel coordinate plots for any arbitrary number of variables. Alphanumerical categorical variables are displayed equally spaced according to the currently defined order. Numerical variables are scaled according to their actual numbers.

Besides standard selection and interrogation techniques, interactivity in a parallel coordinates comprises:

  • Reordering of the variables via drag & drop (use <alt>-drag)
  • Switch between uniform and individual scale (also for selected subsets of axes)
  • Adjust α-level of lines via context-menu or the left and right arrow key.
  • Select Axes by a single click on the axis name and use:
    • BACKSPACE to delete this axis from the plot
    • <meta>-I to invert the axis
  • Type PAGE-UP or PAGE-DOWN repeatedly to cycle through the minimum number of ordering to see ALL adjacencies of the variables in the plot.
    (Note:
     For k variables we need [(k+1)/2] permutations as shown in Ed Wegman's 1991 paper)
Additionally two commands allow to focus on specific subgroups of the data:
  • HotSelection only shows the currently selected points in PCPs and PBPs
  • Crop Selection removes the currently selected lines from the PCP. Subsequent crop operations allow to peel a data set. (does only work for lines)
Selections can only be performed on the axis. If a plot with many variables extends the screen, use meta-0 to fit to screen size.


PCP plot

A parallel coordinate plot for the olive oil data.



parallel boxplots

A parallel Box plot for the olive oil data.
 



The "Sort Axes by" menu offers various ways to sort axes automatically:
 


The align menu offers means to align/center the axes according to:
  • Center: scale from min to max (default)
  • Mean: center axes around mean
  • Median: center axes around mean
  • Case: If a single case is selected, this case is used as the reference.
  • Value ...: Enter a desired value.

The last four settings use +/- 3 sigma/IQR as scaling. Use arrow key <up> and <down> to increase or decrease the scale.
PCP Align



Boxplots
(Parallel) Boxplots y by x only include a single variable, split by a second categorical variable. To invoke a boxplot y by x select the continuous variable to plot and the categorical variable to split by and select 'boxplots y by x' in the 'Plots' menu.

Manual reordering of the classes is only possible by reordering the levels in a corresponding barchart.

The context menu offers to automatically sort the levels by either median or IQ-range (and to reverse a current ordering.)



boxplot y by x

Parallel boxplots for the cars data set - heavy cars selected.


Scatterplots 
Scatterplots offer the basic interactions. Data can be selected and highlighted.

In contrast to most other plots in Mondrian, scatterplots offer axis, showing the maximum and minimum as orientation.

Interrogation methods inside scatterplots operate on three levels. The first level is a simple overview of the position of the cursor, which is displayed as projection onto the x- and y-axis. This interrogation is invoked by simply pressing the altenate key. A pressing control invokes the second level of interrogation. A tooltip is presented with the data of the variables in the plot closest to the curser. If more than one point is found at the same distance, a list of the cases is presented in the pop-up. Holding shift and control shows the information of the selected variables in the variables list.



query level 1
query level 2
query level 3
orientation objects extended

         Three levels of queries in a scatterplot






URL Query Example of an image query which shows a photo of the car, which turned out to be an outlier in the MDS.



In many cases it is very helpful to get additional information of an object, which might only be captured in an image, e.g. a chemical structure or a movie poster.

Mondrian allow to specify the URL to the image location for each case. This can be an entire URL for each case, or a URL composed out of a common part and a case specifc part. The common part of the URL is coded in the column name, the case specific part is the entry in the column entry.
The format is as follows:
A column holding an image URLs must start with '/U'. If there is a common part, it follows after the prefix. The position where the individual entry of the case goes is enclosed with '<' and '>'; this also defines the column name.

Example:

Model        /Uhttp://www.apple-history.com/images/models/<Image>   Launch date ...
Quadra 610   610.gif                                                1993        ...
iBook SE     ibookse.jpg                                            2000        ...
PowerMac G5  g5.jpg                                                 2005        ...
Apple iPhone iphone.jpg                                             2007        ...
...

In above example, the column header could as well be '/U<Image>' and each entry could be the complete path, i.e. 'http://www.apple-history.com/images/models/...', though it would be far less efficient.



When Rserve and R are installed, scatterplots can be enhanced with scatterplot smoothers. Currently the list of smoothers comprises:
  • least square regression (does not need R)
  • loess smoother
  • regression splines (with confidence intervals)
To control the amount of smoothing, use <shift> up/down arrow.

There is an option to either compare the highlighted smoother to all data or to the complement.




SPLOM
SPLOMS (ScatterPLOtMatrix) in Mondrian are "only" a collection of standard scatterplots, efficiently arranged in a single frame. Thus it has the disadvantage that all keyboard shortcuts apply to all panels simultaneously, but the advantage that each panel is a full featured scatterplot.

Hint:
SPLOMs are quite effective for a quick 2-d overview, but are very inefficient when working with more then just a few variables. In this case, parallel coordinate plots are far more effective.


SPLOM




Histograms 
The most crucial point in plotting histograms is to choose the ''right'' origin of the first bin and the ''right'' number of bins. Since there exists a vast amount of rules and hints, what ''right'' means under different assumptions, the most important interactive manipulation inside histograms is changing origin and number resp. width of the bins. This is done by pushing the arrow keys (up and down changes the number of bins, and left and right moves the origin). In order to keep the visual distortion as small as possible, the scale of the histogram axis is not updated during the interactive reparametrization. Obviously the y-scale must then represent probabilities and not counts.
<meta>-0 fits the y-scale after the bin-width has been changed.
The context menu allows to set fixed bin width and origins, either by using the suggested values or by entering arbitrary values.

When Rserve and R are installed, density estimation will enhance the histograms greatly.

histo    histo density
Histogram of the weekly working hours of almost 64.000 household heads


spino    CD plot
A linked Spinogram showing the households head income
(The right plot shows actually a CD-plot)



Histograms can now be weighted. Select two continuous variables (the weights usually should be positive, although Mondrian will not complain about negative weights) and choose weighted Histogram from the plot menu.

Standard Histogram    weighted histogram

Above example shows a typical situation for weighting in a histogram. The left plot shows the distribution of %blacks for the US Midwest counties. The right plot is weighted with the total population, thus showing us the number of people living in areas with a certain % of blacks.
 

Selections 
Selections in Mondrian can be made in two ways.
  1. Simple Selection
  2. Selection Sequences
These two selection modes can be selected in the option menu (or pressing <meta>-m) by switching selection sequences either on or off. The default is off.

Simple selections are performed as any selection in the operating system's desktop. A new selection replaces the current selection.
Holding down the <shift> key will combine the new selection with the currently selected data in XOR-mode.
Holding down <shift> and <alt> will perform a selection in extended mode, which is AND by default, but can be changed to OR in the Options menu.
 
When using Selection Sequences, any selection is recorded. The selection is represented by a transparent rectangle with 8 handles. Use any of these handles to resize the rectangle (slice) or click-drag the rectangle to move (brush). The popup-context menu on  a selection rectangle will indicate the selection step and offer the choice of changing to a different selection mode (union, intersection, negation, xor), of deleting this step, or the complete sequence. Deleting a single step can also be performed by <backspace>. Use <meta-backspace> to delete the complete sequence. To query objects covered by a selection rectangle hold down the <shift> key to click trough the rectangle.
Selection Sequences can span across plots and more than just one selection can be made per plot. To keep track of the selections made, all selections are annotated in the windows menu, just behind the window title, i.e. "Scatterplot(x,y) [2] [4]" tells us that selection steps 2 and 4 have been made in the scatterplot of the variables x and y.

Use <meta>-a to select all cases.

Selection Sequences

A map with two sample selections of a Selection Sequence. The first selection (south east states) always defaults to "replace" mode. The second selection (north west states) is queried with the context menu and the mode is switched from XOR to OR.
Note: Deleting all selections is not limited to the current plot window.

 

Color
Brushing

Wheras selections are a more transient technique to mark a subgroup of interest, color brushing persistently assigns colors to cases. There are three ways to define persistant colors in Mondrian
  • Definition in a barchart or a mosaic plot via <meta>-b sets a descrete scheme
Color Brushing via a Barchart
  • Definition in a histogram via <meta>-b sets a continuous "rainbow"-scheme
Color Brushing via a histogram
  • Individual colors may be assigned using <meta>-1 to <meta>-9
A color brushed Map Colorbrush 3
LEFT:
In the map of the German voting destricts, the party who won the most votes in 2009 was colored.

TOP:
The barchart shows the same coloring for the different states.

To clear all colors use either the (context) menu option or press <alt>-<meta>-b.

Although looking very useful at the first sight, one should keep two very critical issues with color-brushing in mind:
  • Permanently defined colors alway interfere with the highlighing color and may cause confusion
  • Wheras overplotting is no problem for highlighting (it is alway plotted on top) the overplotting issue with multiple colors can not be resolved satisfactory (α-transparency won't work here too well)


 Conventions 
The key to a smooth and efficient user interface are conventions. Once the user learned the basic set of operations like, selections, interrogations, zooming and alteration, she/he can perform these operation within any plot.

In an interactive graphical system, possible interactions can be performed by mouse and keyboard. Since JAVA programs are not bound to a specific platform, Mondrian tries to only makes use of features, which can be found on all platforms. There are some restrictions like one-button-mouse for most MAC-users (Steve give us the right button!!). The most commonly found modifier keys are SHIFT, CONTROL, ALTERNATE and META. CONTROL is blocked as the popup-trigger on the Macintosh, META abused under Windows and ALT blocked by many window-managers under Linux.

The interactions in Mondrian are assigned as follows:

  • click and drag -> create a selection (rectangle)
  • META-click and drag -> zoom in/out (is middle-click (wheel) and drag on Windows & Linux)
  • META and mouse-over -> query object (use META-SHIFT to get extended query)
  • popup-trigger on background -> alter the plot setting
  • ALT-click and drag -> reorder objects
If possible, interactions with objects should use existing knowledge of the user. E.g. the resize operation of a selection rectangle in Mondrian is performed by dragging at one of the eight handles. This operation is well known from object based layout software like Adobe Illustrator or QuarkXPress.
 

α-Channel 
The α-channel can be used to specify the transparency of an object painted. This is very useful, when plotting really many objects , which would result in heavy overplotting. Thus the density of objects can be easily displayed.

The figures below show an application using the well known "pollen" dataset.




The darker string in the parallel coordinate plot above is actually the word "EUREKA", which was put into the artificial dataset. Zooming the scatterplot below would show us the 6 letters of the word.



 
There is a new option to invert the density scheme. (Does not work on Windows)


 

Modeling 
Although Mondrian was not designed to support statistical modeling of datasets, a graphical modeling technique for categorical data using Mosaic Plots is built in.

The so called ModelNavigator allows a stepwise graphical modeling of loglinear models.

The ModelNavigator basically inverts the usage of graphs and models. Whereas packages like R or S-Plus usually assume a model, for which diagnostic plots can be plotted, the approach in Mondrian starts with a graph, to set up a model, and uses the statistical measures as diagnostics, to reinforce the graphical implications.

For a more precise description of this technique see the paper on Visualization of Loglinear Models.
 


The figure below shows the ModelNavigator used to model the Detergent data, often used to illustrate loglinear models for 3 and more variables.

model navigator
 Data
ASCII Data 
Mondrian supports the standard ASCII data format, which consist of a header of variable names, and tab-delimited columns.

Numerical and alphanumerical data may be used. See example below:

       
Country    Car                     MPG        Weight     Horsepower
U.S.       Buick Estate Wagon      16.9       4.36       155
U.S.       Ford Country Squire Wgn 15.5       4.054      142
U.S.       Chevy Malibu Wagon      19.2       3.605      125
U.S.       Chrysler LeBaron Wagon  18.5       3.94       150
U.S.       Chevette                30         2.155      68
Japan      Toyota Corona           27.5       2.56       95
Japan      Datsun 510              27.2       2.3        97
U.S.       Dodge Omni              30.9       2.23       75
Germany    Audi 5000               20.3       2.83       103
Sweden     Volvo 240 GL            17         3.14       125
Sweden     Saab 99 GLE             21.6       2.795      115
France     Peugeot 694 SL          16.2       3.41       133
...
 


Since Mondrian detects the format of a column automatically (continuous or categorical) the detection can be overridden by putting a '/C' for continuous and a '/D' for discrete as a prefix in front of the variable name.

The mode of non-numerical variables can be set interactively:
mode
Double click (or use <meta>-T if you need to change more than one variable) a continuous variable (num) to change it to be categorical (cat). Vice versa double click cat to change to num.

Alpha numerical variables are tagged as alpha and can't be changed to any other type.

To get a fast and effective overview of which variables have missings, there are 'white'-versions of the icons of all three types, i.e. alpha-miss, cat-miss and num-miss indicating at least one missing in the particular variable.

When working with very many variables, just type the prefix of a variable name to search for a particular variable and to make the variable window select the hits and also scroll to the first hit.


Polygon Data must be stored in a separate map file

The format for map-data

The dataset must include one variable of references, the polygons can refer to. This variable must start with /P. If a dataset refers to a polygon, there must be an empty line after the data matrix followed by the relative path+filename to the file containing the map data.

In the map file, each polygon must be defined as follows:

It must start with a header like

id \t name \t n
where id is the matching id from the reference variable. Name can be any arbitrary string naming the polygon. n is the number of points in the polygon.
This header is followed by x and y coordinates defining the polygon - separated by tabs, one pair per line. The first and last coordinates must match, i.e. the polygon must be closed.

An example for Union county:
...
-1.3050 0.7141

1761 /Pnew jersey,union 25
-1.2981 0.7112
-1.2997 0.7100
-1.2995 0.7097
-1.2990 0.7099
-1.2988 0.7098
-1.2991 0.7094
-1.2992 0.7090
-1.2999 0.7086
-1.2985 0.7088
-1.2969 0.7089
-1.2969 0.7088
-1.2964 0.7087
-1.2954 0.7088
-1.2951 0.7090
-1.2947 0.7095
-1.2945 0.7095
-1.2942 0.7100
-1.2942 0.7102
-1.2945 0.7103
-1.2949 0.7103
-1.2956 0.7106
-1.2965 0.7108
-1.2970 0.7107
-1.2976 0.7108
-1.2981 0.7112

1762 /Pnew jersey,warren 33
-1.3112 0.7149
...



R-dataframe 

Mondrian supports loading data directly from R workspaces. To do so, one only needs to specify the R workspace file (in most cases it might default to .RData). Once the workspace file is chosen, Mondrian lists all dataframes within this workspace. Selecting the desired dataframe will dump a temporary file from R and read this file into Mondrian.


Load R Dataframe


Database 
Connections 

The development version of Mondrian allows the connection to databases via the JDBC interface.

Currently this type of connection, which leaves the data entirely inside the database, is under further development and thus not released with the latest releases.

The figure below shows the database connection dialog: 




Data Sets 
Here are some sample data sets, which are ready to load and test with Mondrian (make sure to save the link directly to preserve the tabs!):

Titanic
Data set on the 2201 passengers of the Titanic. Pure categorical with data on class, gender, age and survival.

Pollen
Fake data set with hidden feature, which is easily found with α-channel features.

Olive Oils
Data set on Italian olive oils. Several fatty acids have been measured which allow to separate the different regions from Italy.

Berlin (old map format)
Election and socio-economic data on the city of Berlin, shortly after the Berlin Wall was torn down. Includes a polygon of the districts of Berlin.

US Election 2004 (new map format)
Data on the 2004 US presidential election. Includes polygons of the Counties of the US. Data courtesy of GeoVISTA (http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/a/c/acr181/election.html)





Preferences 
Mondrian features a preferences dialog, to set your favorite background and highlight color. Five schemes are preset. If you have some other intriguing color scheme, please let me know to integrate it.
You may save your custom scheme if none of the defaults suits you.

Preference
Downloads 
By downloading any version of Mondrian, you accept the following license:

Copyright (c) 1997-1998 AT&T Labs Research,
              2002-2006 University of Augsburg.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at
your option) any later version.


This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU
General Public License for more details.


You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

Read-only svn-access to the source code:

svn://svn.rforge.net/org/trunk/rosuda/Mondrian/


Binaries for Windows, MacOSX and Linux:

1.1 as of 1/25/2010.
Windows (exe-file)
UNIX (JAR-file)
Mac OS X (Disk-Image containing application and demo data)


Changes:
- Load data directly from R workspace files
- New color schemes
- Compatible with Java 6 on all platforms
- Very many bug fixes and minor features added

1.0 as of 12/18/2008.
Windows (exe-file)
UNIX (JAR-file)
Mac OS X (Disk-Image containing application and demo data)


Changes:
- Autostart of Rserve under Windows and Linux
- Searchable variable list window
- Missing value plot is compatible to color brushing now

Changes in Version 1.0 beta12 as of 08/29/2008.
- Support for Rserve 0.5+
- Fixes and clean-ups

Changes in
Version 1.0 beta11 as of 03/19/2008.
- Image can be used in extended queries for URL variables
- New color scheme in maps
- Search in barcharts by typing a prefix of the level
- Fixes and clean-ups

Changes in Version 1.0 beta10 as of 12/16/2007.
- More consistent menu entries and menu labels for plot windows
- A 'Open Recent ...' menu entry
- Indication of missingness in the variable window icons
- Window sizes can now be set in the scale dialog box
- Censored zooming in barcharts (shift up/down-arrow) consistent with mosaic plots

Changes in Version 1.0 beta7 as of 05/13/2007.
- Rserve start-up compatible with Rserve for R2.5.x
- SPLOMs are available now (for those who like'm ...)

- histograms are more consistent now (weighted histograms support densities (needs Rserve), spinograms now work at any zoom level)
- better scaling and queries in parallel boxplots (still incomplete)
- several
fixes and enhancements ...

Changes in Version 1.0 beta3 as of 10/31/2006.
- simple transformations (+, *, -, /, log, 1/x, ...)
- selection order of variables in variable window is reflected in all multivariate plots!
- many minor fixes and enhancements ...

Changes in Version 1.0 beta1 as of 05/24/2006.
- new much faster loader (note: maps are now expected to be in a separate file)
- missing values (coded as "NA") are suported in all graphics
- missing value plot can be used to investigate the structure of the missing values.
- custom scaling (<meta>-j), scatterplot only, other plots to follow
-
color brushing (<meta>-b) in barcharts, mosaic plots and histograms (rainbow)
- <meta>-1...9 sets persistent colors for the current selection
- derived variables from selection- and color-state
- painting, via "OR"-mode in the first selection step of a selection sequence
- many minor fixes and enhancements ...

Changes in Version RC 1.0m as of 11/29/2005.
- Using 1.4.x JVM on all platforms.
- '<-' and '->' can be used to change the saturation of boundaries in maps.
- "Boxplot y by x" is now a separate menu item.
- Levels can now be sorted in boxplots y by x according to median or IQ-range.
- Plotting of 2-dim MDS (input is not carefully checked yet)

Changes in Version RC 1.0f as of 04/06/2005.
- Queries are now implemented via ToolTips.
- Further improvements to Parallel Coordinate Plots. See section for details!
- Maps now feature six different color schemes for shading choropleth maps.
- Under MacOSX you can now drop files on Mondrian to start the application and load the data.
- If you have R and Simon's Rserve installed on your machine, you find new features in
  
+ Histograms
  
+ Scatterplots

Changes in Version RC 1.0 as pf 09/24/2004:
-
Vast improvements to Parallel Coordinate Plots. Se section for details!
- Printing works via <meta>-P in all plots. In MacOS X use "Preview" to save as PDF.
- Additional sorting options in Barcharts.
- Histogram parameters can now be set manually as well.
- Choropleth maps can now be inverted and colored by rank.
- Yet another update to the L&F of selection sequences.

Changes in Version 0.99a as of 03/11/2004:
- an updated version of selection sequences. See the section for details.
- "window" menu and more intelligent window placement
- new controls to set width and origins in histograms
- zooming for all platforms (use middle mouse button on all other machines than mac)

Changes in Version 0.99 as of 11/18/2003
- Three new variations of Mosaic plots (same bin size, fluctuation diagram and multiple barcharts)
- Automatic sorting of axes in a parallel coordinate plot
- Use meta-R to switch the splitting direction of the last variable in a Mosaic plots
- Inverse color scheme for density highlighting in scatterplots
- Preference box to set highlight color and background color
- Zooming under Windows is still delayed because of a yet to be finalized major update on the interface

Changes in Version 0.98 as of 03/22/2003:
- Boxplots y by x. Just select a continuous variable and a categorical variable and choose 'parallel boxplots' in the plot menu.
- Regression lines in scatterplots (can be queried)
- Highlight color is now red!
- Add lines in scatterplots by third variables to visualize paths and other relationships.

Changes in Version 0.97a as of 11/21/2002:
- oneClick selection is introduced, i.e. a selection rectangle of size 0 will only select the clicked object, but NOT create a corresponding selection rectangle (selection is only temporary as with the select all feature (META-a))
- Bug fix in Scatterplots
- Update on selection rectangle appearance

Changes in Version 0.97 as of 7/12/2002:
- META-a will select all points in any plot now
- alpha-channel works in scatterplots (use arrow keys to change) and parallel coordinates (via pop-up).
- scatterplot are automatically binned, if the dataset is really large (can be overridden)
- interrogation in maps added

First public release 0.96 as of 4/9/2002

Note: The JAR-file can be started by a simple double click. Within Windows, Sun's JRE or JDK must be installed (make sure that .jar files are not associated with any decompression application), Mac OS X users just smile.

References

The best reference to cite Mondrian - apart from the website - is 'the book'.

@book{1502124,
 author = {Theus,, Martin and Urbanek,, Simon},
 title = {Interactive Graphics for Data Analysis: Principles and Examples (Computer Science and Data Analysis)},
 year = {2008},
 isbn = {1584885947, 9781584885948},
 publisher = {Chapman \& Hall/CRC},
}

There is also the JSS-Paper:

@article{Theus:2002:JSSOBK:v07i11,

  author =    "Martin  Theus",
  title =    "Interactive Data Visualization using Mondrian",
  journal =    "Journal of Statistical Software",
  volume =    "7",
  number =    "11",
  pages =    "1--9",
  day =      "22",
  month =    "11",
  year =     "2002",
  CODEN =    "JSSOBK",
  ISSN =     "1548-7660",
  bibdate =    "2002-11-22",
  URL =      "http://www.jstatsoft.org/v07/i11",
  accepted =    "2002-11-22",
  acknowledgement = "",
  keywords =    "",
  submitted =    "2002-07-11",
}
Help

Starting Rserve
Getting the tiny warning message after starting Mondrian does only indicate that there is no connection to R. This will NOT harm Mondrian in its core functionality - one can happily live without the R connection.

Rserve is now a regular R package and can be installed as such. Right now, Mondrian will start Rserve automatically
only under MacOSX. For the time being, Windows and Linux users need to start Rserve manually. Detailled instructions on how to do this can be found here.

File Formats

If you have trouble getting data loaded into Mondrian, load the file into MS Excel first, and check whether
  • all variables have a name in the header, i.e. the first row/line
    (When saving data from R without omitting the row names, the "row.name" column has no heading name!)
  • there are empty cells in the file. Mondrian currently does not tolerate empty entries.
When exporting from MS Excel, choose the ".tsv" format (tab separated columns).

If your data is more complex or too large, you may do the similar "data washing" procedure using R. It is most easy when you use the JGR GUI, which has an "Open Dataset" menu item and allows to save the file from the object browser.


Starting a JAR File under Windows
(if one can't use "Mondrian.exe" for some reason)

After an installation of SUNs latest JRE (or JDK), .jar-files can be started by a simple double click. If this does not work, the following two problems might be the cause
  1. There is no application associated with the suffix .jar. To change this, follow these instructions.
  2. Another application "grabbed" the responsibility for .jar-files - usually "WinRAR" - after the installation of the JRE. To change this, you must:
  • Launch the WinRAR application
    (Start -> Programs -> WinRAR -> WinRAR)
  • Once the application has been started, select "Options", "Settings".
  • Select the "Integration" tab.
  • This tab lists all associated file types for the WinRAR application. De-select the "JAR" type and click "Ok".
  • Close the WinRAR application.
It may take another restart, to convince the system that things actually changed, but this should be it.

Other Problems
Please mail to either mondrian@theusRus.de or the mailing list stats-rosuda-devel, or submit your issue at the
Bugzilla based bug-tracker.

Issues of general interest will be posted on this page.


Martin Theus, 1/25/2010