Snapshot plots: displaying summary tables as parallel univariate plots with consistent color highlighting

arXiv:2607.28302v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: For empirical studies, social and health scientists give background characteristics of their sample and summarize them in the famous "Table 1". When treatment/ control groups are present, this table gives summary statistics by group to see whether the background characteristics differ by group. We propose snapshot plots --- parallel univariate plots with consistent highlighting --- to visualize such tables. Compared to "Table 1", such plots are designed to facilitate comparisons of background characteristics --- in particular among groups --- and give more detail on numerical variables. We provide a web app as well as a python implementation of snapshot plots. Snapshot plots arise as edge cases of hammock plots (parallel coordinate plots for mixed categorical/ numerical data). We demonstrate the usefulness of snapshot plots for two "Table 1"s.