Greetings,
I was asked if QlikView can produce a biplot chart, in the context of agronomy, crop science, and genetics. It is, in my opinion a more complex form of a scatter chart.
Can QlikView produce a biplot graph? If yes, please explain how.
If not, is there a means to use a custom object to that effect?
If not, is there a public domain 3rd party graph package that can be exposed into a QlikView document to produce a biplot?
Thank you in advance for your insights. -Ricardo Pous at Pioneer
Definition - Biplot graph is a representation of multivariate data in which information on both the samples (observations) and the variables of a data matrix is given simultaneously in two or three dimensions: the samples are represented as points, while the variables are represented as labelled, calibrated axes. The axes are either linear and oblique, or non-linear. This approach to biplots differs from the more traditional approach in which samples and variables are represented as points and/or uncalibrated vectors. Some dimension-reduction technique is typically used to represent the samples as points, often called principal component analysis.
Existing biplot software - Many statistical packages can be used to produce at least the simplest of biplots of the traditional approach. These include the major statistical packages Minitab Inc, SPSS Inc 2008), StataCorp LP 2007, and products from SAS Institute Inc 2009. Functionality is often limited, and the results hard to obtain. Greater functionality is provided by the three dedicated biplot programs XLS-Biplot (Udina 2005a,b), GGEBiplot (Yan and Kang 2006) and BiPlot (Lipkovich and Smith 2002a,b). XLS-Biplot is based on XLisp-Stat (Tierney 1990) and has many useful features including a related web-server that can be used to construct biplots online. GGEbiplot is aimed mainly at agronomists, crop scientists and geneticists. It supplements the book by Yan and Kang (2003). BiPlot is an add-on for Excel, and although therefore potentially widely useful, it unfortunately has some minor but serious shortcomings (see Udina 2005b). The Genstat package (VSN International Ltd 2008) can be used to calculate the coordinates of the elements of a biplot. These can then be drawn using a procedure from an add-on library. Other packages, o_ering some traditional biplot functionality, include Manet (Hofmann 2000), for Macintosh only, and ViSta (Young 2001). Some packages are aimed at ecologists|brodgar (Highland Statistics Ltd 2008) with R, Canoco (Plant Research International 2002) with CanoDraw (Smilauer 2003), MVSP (Kovach Computing Services 2008) and PC-ORD (MjM Software Design 2009)|while the Excel add-on BrandMap (WRC Research Systems Inc 2007) is aimed at marketers. STATISTICA (StatSoft Inc 2009) is currently the only mainstream statistical package capable of producing calibrated new-approach biplots, albeit the PCA biplot only. All the software mentioned are for purchase, except XLS-Biplot, BiPlot, Manet and ViSta which are available free of charge. So too is R (R Development Core Team 2009).
(source: http://www.jstatsoft.org/v30/i12/paper) -the computational details also contained in this reference and too long to include in the discussion.
