This data comes from The Equality of Opportunity Project to analyze the role that colleges play in the upward mobility of incomes based on the types of students they enroll and their economic standing before and after graduating. The subset of data used includes colleges located in CA. In addition, these observations are based on the students within the 1980, 1981 and 1982 birth cohorts.
The visualization provided is a scatterplot matrix, a technique used to help portray multivariate data. This graph plots the five variables against each other to analyze their relationship and observe any possible linearity. The variables used are as follows:
The colors of the points are based on 3 different tiers:
There is a lot one can take away from looking at the various plots in the scatterplot matrix. It is important to find possible correlations, whether negative or positive. For example, looking at K_Rank vs P_Rank we can deduce that the higher the parents income is, the greater chance the child’s income will be high as well and vice versa. It is also important to look for clustering of data points. For example, looking at the Mobility_Kq5 vs K_Rank we can easily see the clustering of school tiers in the y-direction.