|
gnuplot enthusiast Robert Billon has a nice collection of gnuplot screenshots. Here is a Descarte's Folium; here are two intersecting tori. The input for both is as trig functions, but gnuplot can also plot data given as sets of points. In the original version of this posting, I demonstrated by linking to a gnuplot nude, but some readers found that unsuitable, so I've removed the link. It did make a serious point however, because the plot was captioned gnuplot can plot any curve from a suitable datafile. And that is one theme of my posting. Oh yes, and gnuplot can also do penguins.
Not only is gnuplot versatile; it is free, and easy to drive from a program. I am going to show you how to call it from Java, to generate graphs embedded in Web pages. I've been using it in work with the Oxford Pain Research Group, plotting graphs that summarise data from clinical trial spreadsheets about patients' responses to drugs. Our goal was to report on the drugs' efficacy, in units that doctors can easily understand and use when prescribing. As well as telling you about gnuplot, I'll explain about reading data from spreadsheets with Andrew Khan's free Java JExcelAPI library; and about structuring the reports as Web pages, making it easy to link related sections, and to link from summarised quantities back to the original data for the patients being summarised. But first, I have asked my friend Sebastian Straube to explain why one needs these measures of drug efficacy.
December 16, 2008
URL:http://www.drdobbs.com/jvm/measuring-drug-efficacy-plotting-java-gr/228700735
Terms of Service | Privacy Statement | Copyright © 2024 UBM Tech, All rights reserved.