Credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory
The scatter plots above are based on a dataset containing 46 universities with 14 attributes of interest for prospective students: academics, athletics, housing, location, nightlife, safety, transportation, weather, score, tuition, dining, PhD/faculty, population, and income. The large red nodes represent the attributes and the small blue points represent the universities; the contour lines (middle plot) show how the numerical values of the attributes change. This prospective student wants to attend a university with good academics (>9/10). Universities that meet this criterion are within the contours lines whose value exceeds 9. To determine which universities meet multiple criteria, students would see where the universities and attributes overlap (right plot).