Parallel coordinates plot with skipped coordinates

Question

People are racing at 100 m, 400 m, 1600 m tracks and their finish time is recorded. I want to present data for each racer in parallel coordinates plot. Some racers may not finish the track. In this case I would like to mark it somehow, either by an infinity point or somehow with a color for a specific track.

As an example I made a parallel coordinates plot in paint:
Lazyman hasn't finished the 1600m track and this is marked with x.

An example data set is given in the following "racing.csv":

RACER,TRACK.100m,TRACK.400m,TRACK.1500m
Superman,0.1,0.5,1
Lazyman,200,900,Inf

I have tried a solution with pandas:

import pandas
from pandas.tools.plotting import parallel_coordinates
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

d = pandas.read_csv('racing.csv')

f = plt.figure()
parallel_coordinates(d, 'RACER')
f.axes[0].set_yscale('log')

plt.show()

This gives a plot without Inf value for Lazyman at 1600m:

I also prepared a csv for ggplot (there may be a better way to do this):

RACER,TRACK,TIME
Superman,100m,0.1
Superman,400m,0.5
Superman,1600m,1
Lazyman,100m,200
Lazyman,400m,900
Lazyman,1600m,Inf

With using ggplot:

require(ggplot2)
d <- read.csv('racing2.csv')
g <- ggplot(d) + geom_line(aes(x=TRACK,y=TIME,group=RACER, color=RACER))
g <- g + scale_y_log10()
ggsave('ggplot.png')

I got closer:

as this shows an infinity value, but doesn't make any annotation to it.

Any solution, either Python or R, will be appreciated. Also, suggestions regarding marking unfinished races are appreciated.

Answer 1

With R and ggplot2 :

Build some bogus data:

df <- data.frame(ID = factor(c(rep(1, 3), rep(2, 3), rep(3, 3)), labels = c('Realman', 'Lazyman', 'Superman')),
             race = factor(rep(seq(1,3,1), 3), labels = c('100m', '400m', '1600m')),
             runTime = c(8.9, 20.5, 150.9, 100.1, 300.3, +Inf, 1.2, 5, +Inf))

        ID  race runTime
# 1  Realman  100m     8.9
# 2  Realman  400m    20.5
# 3  Realman 1600m   150.9
# 4  Lazyman  100m   100.1
# 5  Lazyman  400m   300.3
# 6  Lazyman 1600m     Inf
# 7 Superman  100m     1.2
# 8 Superman  400m     5.0
# 9 Superman 1600m     Inf

Result:

Code:

ggplot(filter(df, runTime != +Inf), aes(x = race, y = runTime, group = ID, color = ID)) + 
    geom_line(size = 2) +
    geom_point(size = 4) +

    geom_line(data = df, linetype = 'dashed', size = 1) +        
    geom_point(data = df, shape = 21, size = 1) +

    geom_text(aes(label = runTime), position = position_nudge(y = -.1)) +

    scale_y_continuous(trans = 'log10', breaks = c(1, 10, 100, 1000)) +
    scale_x_discrete('Track') +
    scale_color_manual('Racer', values = brewer.pal(length(levels(df$ID)), 'Set1')) +

    theme(panel.background = element_blank(),
          panel.grid.major.x = element_line(colour = 'lightgrey', size = 25),
          legend.position = 'top',
          axis.line.y = element_line('black', .5, arrow = arrow()))