Escaping RGBland: Selecting colors for statistical graphics

Statistical graphics are often augmented by the use of color coding information contained in some variable. When this involves the shading of areas (and not only points or lines)-e.g., as in bar plots, pie charts, mosaic displays or heatmaps-it is important that the colors are perceptually based and do not introduce optical illusions or systematic bias. Based on the perceptually-based Hue-Chroma-Luminance (HCL) color space suitable color palettes are derived for coding categorical data (qualitative palettes) and numerical variables (sequential and diverging palettes).

[1]  Charles Poynton.  Frequently Asked Questions about Color , 1997 .

[2]  Alain Giron,et al.  Kernel logistic PLS: A tool for supervised nonlinear dimensionality reduction and binary classification , 2007, Comput. Stat. Data Anal..

[3]  A R Smith,et al.  Color Gamut Transformation Pairs , 1978 .

[4]  Jaroslaw Harezlak,et al.  Penalized solutions to functional regression problems , 2007, Comput. Stat. Data Anal..

[5]  Alan E. Gelfand,et al.  Multilevel modeling using spatial processes: Application to the Singapore housing market , 2007, Comput. Stat. Data Anal..

[6]  Cynthia A. Brewer,et al.  ColorBrewer.org: An Online Tool for Selecting Colour Schemes for Maps , 2003 .

[7]  Anne Morgan Spalter,et al.  Interactive color palette tools , 2004, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications.

[8]  Thomas Kneib.  Mixed model-based inference in geoadditive hazard regression for interval-censored survival times , 2006, Comput. Stat. Data Anal..

[9]  Edward R. Tufte,et al.  Envisioning Information , 1990 .

[10]  B. Duval.  Commission internationale de l’éclairage (CIE) , 2001, Optique Photonique.

[11]  R. M. Boynton.  Human color vision , 1979 .

[12]  Michael Friendly,et al.  A Brief History of the Mosaic Display , 2002 .

[13]  C. Robert,et al.  Computational and Inferential Difficulties with Mixture Posterior Distributions , 2000 .

[14]  A. Bowman,et al.  A look at some data on the old faithful geyser , 1990 .

[15]  Leo Maurice Hurvich,et al.  Color vision , 1981 .

[16]  Haim Levkowitz,et al.  Color scales for image data , 1992, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications.

[17]  J. Mollon.  Color vision. , 1982, Annual review of psychology.

[18]  Alvy Ray Smith,et al.  Color gamut transform pairs , 1978, SIGGRAPH.

[19]  K. Hornik,et al.  Residual-Based Shadings for Visualizing (Conditional) Independence , 2007 .

[20]  Giovanni S. Moretti,et al.  Tools for the selection of colour palettes , 2002, CHINZ '02.

[21]  Hongqin Zhang,et al.  How Well Can People Use Different Color Attributes? , 2004, CIC.

[22]  Cynthia A. Brewer,et al.  Color use guidelines for data representation , 1999 .

[23]  William S. Cleveland,et al.  A Color-Caused Optical Illusion on a Statistical Graph , 1983 .

[24]  Kurt Hornik,et al.  The Strucplot Framework: Visualizing Multi-way Contingency Tables with vcd , 2006 .

[25]  Colin Ware,et al.  Color sequences for univariate maps: theory, experiments and principles , 1988, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications.

[26]  Ross Ihaka,et al.  Colour for Presentation Graphics , 2003 .