Four and twenty tern chicks plotted in a pie: a graphical interface for predicting chick ages with a confidence estimate

  • Authors:

  • Paul Lyons;Geoffrey Jones

  • Affiliations:

  • Massey University, Palmerston North;Massey University, Palmerston North

  • Venue:
  • CHINZ '06 Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGCHI New Zealand chapter's international conference on Computer-human interaction: design centered HCI
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

We present a computer interface that represents the age of chicks as dynamically-generated chromatic bands on a set of plots drawn on conventional Cartesian axes. The chromatic information allows us to increase the number of variables on the plot from two to three, so that the user can infer a chick's age from two easily obtained body measurements. The overall image contains a number of realisations of a non-linear multivariate hierarchical model of chick growth; the model is parametric, and each plot is produced by running the model with a different combination of parameters. Even with chromatic banding, the plots can be difficult to interpret because, when many plots overlap, later plots obscure earlier ones. To reveal the information hidden thereby, the interface incorporates a component that allows the user to generate a pie-chart showing all the ages that fall within a 95% confidence ellipse around any point on the plot.