The Hammock Plot: Where Categorical and Numerical Data Relax Together
Applications
2026-02-26 v3 Human-Computer Interaction
Abstract
Effective methods for visualizing data involving multiple variables, including categorical ones, are limited. The hammock plot (Schonlau 2003) visualizes both categorical and numerical variables using parallel coordinates. We introduce the Stata implementation hammock. We give numerous examples that explore highlighting, missing values, putting axes on the same scale, and tracing an observation across variables. Further, we discuss parallel univariate plots as an edge case of hammock plots. We also present and make publicly available a new dataset on the 2020 Tour de France.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2506.13630,
title = {The Hammock Plot: Where Categorical and Numerical Data Relax Together},
author = {Matthias Schonlau and Tiancheng Yang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.13630},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
21 pages, 10 figures, 1 table. Submitted to the Stata Journal