Visualizing Composite Data on the Lexis Surface

Jonas Schoeley, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research
Frans Willekens, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research

The analysis of composite data is a topic inherent to demography. In recent times, due to a growing catalogue of detailed population data, it became feasible to consider populations not only structured by time, age or sex, but by any number of interesting criteria. This “inflation” of data dimensions produces challenges in visualizing the data. To aid the understanding of age-structured timelines of compositions we seek to extend the Lexis surface plot from 1-dimensional continuous data to multidimensional composite data. We apply different strategies for visualizing composite data on the Lexis surface to French death counts given by cause and compare the results for compliance with multiple desired criteria.