The sorted Binary Plot: A New Technique for Exploratory Data Analysis.

The sorted binary plot is a graphical method for identifying and displaying patterns in multivariate data sets. The construction requires calculation of the median for each variable measured, followed by subtraction of the medians from the values for each sample. The signs of the residuals represent a binary number for each sample. The list of binary numbers is sorted and converted to a graph by assigning distinctive symbols to 1 and 0. The sorting operation causes samples with the same binary number to form clusters. The method can be extended to three or more quantiles. It has been applied to several kinds of data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]