swimmerplots with more than 100 patients

[Anita_n]

Dear all,

I am tring to create a swimmer plot for patients with different cancers. I've already got the graph working. But for some cancer types I have about 130 Patients. Is there any effective way to display such a data on a swimmer plot or does it make sense at all doing that?

I will appreciate any advice

[djrisks]

Hello,

I believe a swimmerplot works best when there are less than around 30 patients. Otherwise it is very difficult to notice any group color's within a patient. Is it possible that you could do a swimmerplot by each group, and therefore not have to show all 130 patients on one graph?

[JeffMeyers]

It depends on how much detail you wish to show for each patient. I tend to limit to around 20 patients per graph if I want to go through each one in detail. If I wanted to see trends across the study without looking at each patient individually I would be fine making the lines and symbols smaller and looking at the swimming chart more like a waterfall plot.

[Anita_n]

@djrisks @JeffMeyers  thanks for the tipps, I will try to make some groups to see if I can get the data to be smaller