mvarVis is an R package for visualization of diverse multivariate analysis methods. We implement two new tools to facilitate analysis that are cumbersome with existing software. The first uses htmlwidgets and d3 to create interactive ordination plots; the second makes it easy to bootstrap multivariate methods and align the resulting scores. The interactive visualizations offer an alternative to printing multiple plots with different supplementary information overlaid, and bootstrapping enables a qualitative assessment of the uncertainty underlying the application of exploratory multivariate methods on particular data sets.
Our approach is to leverage existing packages -- FactoMineR, ade4, and vegan -- to perform the actual dimension reduction, and build a new layer for visualizing and bootstrapping their results. This allows our tools to wrap a variety of existing methods, including one table, multitable, and distance-based approaches -- principal components, multiple factor analysis, and multidimensional scaling, for example. Since our package uses htmlwidgets, it is possible to embed our interactive plots in Rmarkdown pages and Shiny apps. All code and many examples are available on our github.
