Parallel Coordinate

Authors

[Editor] Hu Zheng;

[Contributors]

Modified

2026-01-17

Note

Hiplot website

This page is the tutorial for source code version of the Hiplot Parallel Coordinate plugin. You can also use the Hiplot website to achieve no code ploting. For more information please see the following link:

https://hiplot.cn/basic/parallel-coordinate?lang=en

Setup

  • System Requirements: Cross-platform (Linux/MacOS/Windows)

  • Programming language: R

  • Dependent packages: data.table; jsonlite; GGally; hrbrthemes; viridis; ggthemes

# Install packages
if (!requireNamespace("data.table", quietly = TRUE)) {
  install.packages("data.table")
}
if (!requireNamespace("jsonlite", quietly = TRUE)) {
  install.packages("jsonlite")
}
if (!requireNamespace("GGally", quietly = TRUE)) {
  install.packages("GGally")
}
if (!requireNamespace("hrbrthemes", quietly = TRUE)) {
  remotes::install_github("hrbrmstr/hrbrthemes")
}
if (!requireNamespace("viridis", quietly = TRUE)) {
  install.packages("viridis")
}
if (!requireNamespace("ggthemes", quietly = TRUE)) {
  install.packages("ggthemes")
}

# Load packages
library(data.table)
library(jsonlite)
library(GGally)
library(hrbrthemes)
library(viridis)
library(ggthemes)
sessioninfo::session_info("attached")
─ Session info ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
 setting  value
 version  R version 4.5.2 (2025-10-31)
 os       Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS
 system   x86_64, linux-gnu
 ui       X11
 language (EN)
 collate  C.UTF-8
 ctype    C.UTF-8
 tz       UTC
 date     2026-01-17
 pandoc   3.1.3 @ /usr/bin/ (via rmarkdown)
 quarto   1.8.27 @ /usr/local/bin/quarto

─ Packages ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
 package     * version date (UTC) lib source
 data.table  * 1.18.0  2025-12-24 [1] RSPM
 GGally      * 2.4.0   2025-08-23 [1] RSPM
 ggplot2     * 4.0.1   2025-11-14 [1] RSPM
 ggthemes    * 5.2.0   2025-11-30 [1] RSPM
 hrbrthemes  * 0.9.2   2025-11-02 [1] Github (hrbrmstr/hrbrthemes@d3fd029)
 jsonlite    * 2.0.0   2025-03-27 [1] RSPM
 viridis     * 0.6.5   2024-01-29 [1] RSPM
 viridisLite * 0.4.2   2023-05-02 [1] RSPM

 [1] /home/runner/work/_temp/Library
 [2] /opt/R/4.5.2/lib/R/site-library
 [3] /opt/R/4.5.2/lib/R/library
 * ── Packages attached to the search path.

──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

Data Preparation

# Load data
data <- data.table::fread(jsonlite::read_json("https://hiplot.cn/ui/basic/parallel-coordinate/data.json")$exampleData$textarea[[1]])
data <- as.data.frame(data)

# Convert data structure
data[, 6] <- factor(data[, 6], levels = unique(data[, 6]))

# View data
head(data)
    Name Value1 Value2 Value3 Value4       Group
1    ATR    5.1    3.5    1.4    0.2 p53 pathway
2  CHEK1    4.9    3.0    1.4    0.2 p53 pathway
3  GORAB    4.7    3.2    1.3    0.2 p53 pathway
4 CDKN2A    4.6    3.1    1.5    0.2 p53 pathway
5   MDM2    5.0    3.6    1.4    0.2 p53 pathway
6   MDM4    5.4    3.9    1.7    0.4 p53 pathway

Visualization

# Parallel Coordinate
p <- ggparcoord(data, columns = 2:(ncol(data) - 1), groupColumn = ncol(data),
                title = "Parallel Coordinate Plot for cancer Data",
                alphaLines = 0.3, scale = "globalminmax",
                showPoints = T, boxplot = F) +
  theme_base() +
  theme(text = element_text(family = "Arial"),
        plot.title = element_text(size = 12, hjust = 0.5),
        axis.title = element_text(size = 10),
        axis.text = element_text(size = 12),
        axis.text.x = element_text(angle = 0, hjust = 0.5,vjust = 1),
        legend.position = "right",
        legend.direction = "vertical",
        legend.title = element_text(size = 10),
        legend.text = element_text(size = 10)) +
  scale_color_viridis(discrete = TRUE) +
  facet_grid(formula(paste("~", (colnames(data)[ncol(data)]))))

p
FigureΒ 1: Parallel Coordinate