Tour types

In tourr: Tour Methods for Multivariate Data Visualisation

knitr::opts_chunk$set(
  collapse = TRUE,
  comment = "#>",
  eval = TRUE
)
library(tourr)

A tour animates a sequence of low-dimensional linear projections of high-dimensional data. Think of it like shining a light on an object and watching the shadow: any single shadow (projection) shows you one view of the shape, but watching many shadows in sequence — as the object slowly rotates — lets you build up a picture of the whole structure. Clusters, outliers, non-linear patterns, and variable associations that would be invisible in a single 2D plot can emerge as the tour progresses.

The two main ingredients in any tour are the projection dimension d (how many dimensions to project down to, usually 1 or 2) and the tour type, which controls how the sequence of projections is chosen. This vignette walks through each tour type, explains when to use it, and shows the code needed to run it.

Throughout we use the flea dataset (74 flea beetle measurements on 6 numeric variables), which has been standardised to have mean 0 and unit variance. The views can be misleading if your data is not standardised, or variables have not been scaled to be on comparable units.

---

Grand tour

The grand tour generates target projections by sampling uniformly from the space of all d-dimensional planes and interpolates smoothly between them. Over time it visits every possible projection, giving a global overview of the data. It is the right starting point when you do not know what structure to look for.

# 2D projections — the default
f <- flea[,1:6] # For convenience
animate_xy(f)

# 1D projections shown as a density
animate_dist(f)

Points that stand apart from the main cloud in many projections are likely outliers. Groups of points that stay together through many projections, then occasionally merge with others, suggest clusters. Because the grand tour samples randomly it will eventually show every view, but it may take a while to stumble on the most revealing one — that is where the guided tour helps.

---

Guided tour

The guided tour adds a direction to the search: it uses projection pursuit to move towards projections that score highly on a chosen index function. Each new target is not random but chosen to increase the index, so the tour makes progress towards the structure you care about rather than wandering at random.

The index function is the key choice:

• holes() looks for projections with low density near the centre and high density near the edges — a signature of separated clusters.
• cmass() looks for projections with high density near the centre — useful for finding outliers that sit away from a dense core.
• lda_pp() and pda_pp() use known class labels to find projections where groups are well separated.

# Find cluster structure without class labels
animate_xy(f, tour_path = guided_tour(holes()))

# Same search, colour by known species once structure is found
animate_xy(f,
  tour_path = guided_tour(holes()),
  col = flea$species
)

# Use class labels directly to separate groups
animate_xy(f,
  tour_path = guided_tour(lda_pp(flea$species)),
  col = flea$species
)

The guided tour terminates when no better projection can be found, so it will stop on its own. The final view it settles on is usually the most revealing one for that index. If it stops too quickly — without finding visible structure — try sphere = TRUE in animate() to remove linear associations first, or start from a different random seed.

---

Little tour

The little tour is a planned tour between all axis-parallel projections: it cycles through every pair of original variables in turn. This makes it a systematic way to survey all the marginal 2D views of the data, equivalent to watching a slow animated scatterplot matrix.

animate_xy(f, tour_path = little_tour())

Because the little tour only visits axis-parallel projections it can miss structure that lives in oblique directions — a cluster that separates along a diagonal will not appear. It is best used as a sanity check or a complement to the grand tour rather than a primary exploration tool.

---

Planned tour

The planned tour replays a sequence of bases you have already saved. The typical workflow is to run a grand tour with save_history(), keep the saved path, and then replay it — perhaps in a different display, or with colour added after the fact.

# Save a grand tour path
set.seed(42)
t1 <- save_history(f, max = 10)

# Replay it in a scatterplot
animate_xy(f, tour_path = planned_tour(t1))

# Replay the same path with species colour added
animate_xy(f,
  tour_path = planned_tour(t1),
  col = flea$species
)

# Cycle continuously through the saved bases
animate_xy(f, tour_path = planned_tour(t1, cycle = TRUE))

The planned tour is also how you share a specific tour with someone else: save the history with save_history(), save the object to disk with saveRDS(), and send it alongside your code.

---

Local tour

The local tour makes small movements around a chosen starting projection. At each step it picks a new target that is within a specified angular distance (angle, in radians) of the current position, so the view never strays far from where you started. This is useful for examining whether a pattern you have spotted is robust — if the structure survives small perturbations of the projection it is a real feature rather than a coincidence of a particular viewing angle.

# Start from a specific projection (e.g. one saved from a guided tour)
start <- basis_random(6, 2)

# Explore a small neighbourhood of angle pi/4
animate_xy(f,
  tour_path = local_tour(start, angle = pi / 4),
  col = flea$species
)

A tighter angle keeps the view closer to the starting point. A wider angle effectively becomes a grand tour. Values around pi/4 to pi/8 are a reasonable starting range.

---

Radial tour

The radial tour answers a specific and practical question: how important is a particular variable to the pattern I can currently see? Starting from a chosen projection, it rotates one variable at a time smoothly out of the projection plane and then back in again, like a dial being turned to zero and back. Watching what happens to the structure in the plot as the variable is removed tells you exactly how much that variable contributes.

The two required arguments are start, the projection matrix to begin from, and mvar, the index (or indices) of the variable(s) to rotate in and out. The start projection is typically one you have already found interesting — for example the final view of a guided tour.

# Use a saved projection as the starting point — here we take the
# end-point of a guided tour run with holes()
set.seed(42)
guided_path  <- save_history(f, guided_tour(holes()), sphere = TRUE)
start        <- matrix(guided_path[, , dim(guided_path)[3]], nrow = 6)

# Rotate variable 4 (elytra width) out and back in
animate_xy(f,
  tour_path = radial_tour(start, mvar = 4),
  col = flea$species,
  rescale = TRUE
)

# Rotate two variables simultaneously to see their joint contribution
animate_xy(f,
  tour_path = radial_tour(start, mvar = c(3, 4)),
  col = flea$species,
  rescale = TRUE
)

The radial tour also works with other display types. If the starting projection is 1D, use animate_dist():

start1d <- basis_random(6, 1)
animate_dist(f, radial_tour(start1d, mvar = 2), rescale = TRUE)

Reading the result. When the variable is rotated out, watch whether the structure (clusters, gaps, outlier positions) collapses or survives:

• Structure disappears when the variable is removed → the variable is essential to producing that pattern.
• Structure survives → the pattern exists without that variable; other variables carry it.
• Structure changes shape but does not vanish → the variable contributes partially; removing it reveals a different facet of the same underlying structure.

This makes the radial tour one of the most useful tools for variable selection and for building intuition about which measurements drive the patterns in your data. It is often run after a guided tour: find an interesting projection with the guided tour, then probe each variable in turn with the radial tour to understand what is making the pattern.

---

Frozen tour

The frozen tour holds the projection coefficients for some variables fixed at specified values and lets the remaining coefficients vary freely under a grand tour. This is useful when you already know that a particular variable or direction is important and want to explore the remaining variation while keeping that variable anchored in view.

Frozen values are specified with a matrix of NA and numeric entries: NA means the coefficient varies freely; a number fixes it.

# Fix variable 3 to contribute equally to both axes
frozen      <- matrix(NA, nrow = 6, ncol = 2)
frozen[3, ] <- 0.5

animate_xy(f, tour_path = frozen_tour(2, frozen))

The frozen tour is the most specialised of the tour types and is most useful when you have domain knowledge that a particular variable should always be visible — for example, when verifying a hypothesis about the role of a specific measurement.

---

Choosing the right tour

| Goal | Recommended tour | |---|---| | General exploration, no prior knowledge | grand_tour() | | Find clusters or outliers efficiently | guided_tour(holes()) | | Find class separation with labels | guided_tour(lda_pp(class)) | | Survey all pairwise marginal views | little_tour() | | Replay or share a specific path | planned_tour(saved_history) | | Stress-test a pattern found elsewhere | local_tour(start) | | Assess which variables drive a pattern | radial_tour(start, mvar) | | Anchor one variable while exploring others | frozen_tour(d, frozen) |

A common workflow is to start with the grand tour to get an overview, switch to the guided tour to pursue interesting features, use the radial tour to understand which variables are responsible for those features, and then use the local tour to confirm that the pattern is stable under small perturbations. The planned tour is then used to communicate findings by replaying the key paths with informative colours or labels.

---

Saving a tour to a file

All tour types can be rendered to a GIF with render_gif(). Replace animate_xy() with render_gif() and supply a gif_file path and frames count.

render_gif(
  f,
  tour_path = guided_tour(holes()),
  display   = display_xy(col = flea$species),
  gif_file  = "guided_flea.gif",
  frames    = 60
)

Further reading

Cook and Laa (2024), Interactively Exploring High-Dimensional Data and Models in R, Chapman & Hall/CRC, provides a comprehensive treatment of tour methods and their application to clustering, dimension reduction, and classification. The online version is available at https://dicook.github.io/mulgar_book/.

tourr documentation built on May 15, 2026, 9:06 a.m.