This paper offers an S-PLUS implementation of mosaic displays of the joint distribution of any number of categorical variables. As an illustration, I examine television viewer data from Nielsen Media Research. The mosaics show interesting patterns in viewer persistence -- viewers remaining with their current channels rather than switching channels -- supporting intuitive explanations of viewer behavior. Many graphical functions in S-PLUS provide for the display of relationships between continuous variables; mosaics help display relationships between categorical variables.
Key Words
Contingency table; Cross-tabulated data; Graphics;
High-dimensional data; Television viewer behavior.
NEW 2006: the Yale Toolkit package includes the generalize pairs plots (with mosaics). Note that mosaicplot() is now built into R and S-Plus.