What Is It?

The Ellipsoid plot type is based on a Scatter Plot and adds confidence intervals displayed as 2D or 3D ellipsoids.

Why Is This Important?

Ellipsoids in Explore are a way of displaying a confidence interval for the data you have plotted. This is important because it is one way of visualizing the most common distributions in your data with respect to your features of interest. For example, using Ellipsoids can help you discover that the highest costs for your shipments are usually due to high values for three of your key indicators, and that the low cost shipments tend to have high values for some of your key indicators but low values for others. You can also see regions of plausibility, such as sensors that should have readings within a certain range, so that if many values are outside of that range, you may have identified an issue with the sensors.

How?

Steps for creating an Ellipsoid plot:

1. To create an Ellipsoid plot, drag one feature from the Features list to the X dimension and one feature to the Y dimension.
2. If you click Apply, you will create a 2D Ellipsoid plot, the most basic option. This will show a single ellipsoid considering all of your points.
3. By adding a feature to the Color dimension, you will see multiple ellipsoids representing areas where each color is more common on your plot.
4. Adding another feature to the Z dimension will create a 3D Ellipsoid plot so that you can understand how even more features are related.
5. The default confidence interval is 95%. This can be changed by opening the Plot Settings by clicking on the hamburger menu in the Mapping panel, then adjusting the confidence level (a higher confidence will result in a larger ellipsoid, while a lower confidence will result in a smaller ellipsoid).