flyover

Painlessly generate high-level visual comparisons of distributions between groups or data sets.

Purpose

This package is for you if:

  • you are dealing with many variables whose distributions may differ in important ways among groups;
  • you have refactored a data process and want to ensure that the new data is acceptably similar to the old data;
  • you are pulling data on a regular schedule and need to monitor data drift;
  • you wish to examine data quality visually rather than relying on statistical tests and thresholds.

flyover provides utilities to quickly generate and organize plots of distributions split by a grouping variable.

Documentation

For detailed instructions, see the package website.

This package is largely powered by ggplot2 for building plots, and the awesome trelliscopejs by Ryan Hafen for providing a viewer to navigate them.

Install 

devtools::install_github("ataustin/flyover")
library(flyover)

Note that the dependencies are large (especially trelliscopejs) and may take a long time to install.

Quickstart

A typical flyover workflow has the following steps:

  1. Combine different data sets into a single table.
  2. Apply a plotting function to the columns of the table.
  3. Build a display to navigate the plots.

If you are comparing distribtions of variables between an old data process and a new one, your workflow might look like this:

old_data <- read.csv("old-data.csv")
new_data <- read.csv("new-data.csv")

enlist_data(old_data, new_data, names = c("old data", "new data")) %>%
  build_plots(flyover_histogram) %>%
  build_display(display_name = "histograms", output_dir = "display-hist")

Get started with the articles in the documentation or jump right into the gallery of displays.

Tips

If you build a display from the console or as a batch job from an R script, you can point your browser directly at the output directory to render the display. You can also render the display inside an R Markdown document by making the call to build_display the last line of a code chunk (ensure the output directory specification is a relative file path, or you will get a knitting error).

Contributing and reporting problems

Please see contribute.md.