Mirador

Irrespective of whether you are analyzing a business report or are working on the thesis for your dissertation, you need to gather, organize and make the data you collected interpretable to comprehend and spot new connections or opportunities from that information.

Mirador is an application specially designed for large databases that enables you to explore the information visually and identify new correlations and trends using statistical tools.

The program comes with a clean interface that is split into three main areas, namely the option panel, the advanced search and the variable browser. While the app is a tool for exploring databases, you should know that it works with CSV, ODS and TSV file formats.

While the utility tries to interpret columns of a table as a variable, the data must meet a few criteria, such as be ordinal or nominal categories, data and time strings, general strings, floating point values and whole numbers.

The app also works with dictionaries, but in this case you need to make sure that the table features at least two columns, one of them acting like an auxiliary dictionary that lists the data types explicitly for each column.

Before you can analyze the correlations between your variables, you need to specify the groups, tables and variables that you are interested in exploring. The program is capable of displaying the relationships between each pair of variables using three graphic aids, meaning histogram, eikosogram and the scatter plot.

While a scatter would be the most simple method of visualizing the data, the histogram enables you to obtain a 2D representation of the data distribution. The eikosogram is a special graphic aid tool that makes it more convenient to exhibit the data that is not dependent on numerical values.

Mirador can help you analyze your database from another perspective, one that can lead to the more effective visualization of new relationships and pattern between the variables you are exploring.