Example: a series of plots of a pair of variables x and y, or a series of histograms of a variable x, one per bin of a histogram on another variable z.

"How does the distribution of x and y change as you vary z?"

One can imagine this being interesting both for continuous-valued z variables (e.g., photometric redshift) and for category-valued z variables (e.g., an object classification, or the WISE variability codes). For a category-valued variable, no association with a histogram would be needed.

When coupled with the programmatic (Python) interface to Firefly it would be possible to drive a series of plots with a more complex selection (e.g., non-uniform bins in photo-z) than would be realistic to provide with direct UI control.

In this use case, the labeling of the plots in the grid would need to be able to indicate the values of z used in the selection.

Here is an example of a very powerful grid-form multi-plot that is used quite a bit in exploratory data analysis:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3735286/create-a-matrix-of-scatterplots-pairs-equivalent-in-ggplot2

(Not all packages make it quite so easy to generate!)

Since we were talking about the use of screen real estate it is interesting to note how they have incorporated the axis labels for the variables into the plot.

This one plot actually incorporates elements from several of the improvement tickets I filed today as well: note the display of 1D distributions adjacent to the 2D ones.

Gregory Dubois-Felsmann is this ticket still relevant?

A small subset of this functionality has been implemented, both in the standard (e.g., tri-view) query-results viewer, and in the "slate" that's used by the Firefly Python interface in Jupyter.

The remaining ideas are still relevant to future Portal and Python API development. It would be a good idea to issue a new ticket for the remainder and close this one with a little more detail.