An application of VIM, the R package for visualization of missing values, to EU-SILC data

Package VIM allows to explore and to analyze the structure of missing values in data, as well as to produce high-quality graphics for publications. This paper illustrates an application of VIM to a highly complex data set – the European Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC). 1 The graphical user interface of VIM The graphical user interface (GUI) has been developed using the R package tcltk [R Development Core Team, 2009] and allows easy handling of the functions included in package VIM. Figure 1 shows the GUI, which pops up automatically after loading the package. > library(VIM) If the GUI has been closed, it can be reopened with the following command. All selections and settings from the last session are thereby recovered. > vmGUImenu() For visualization, the most important menus are the Data, the Visualization and the Options menus. 1.1 Handling data The Data menu allows to select a data frame from the R workspace (see Figure 2). In addition, a data set in .RData format can be imported from the file system into the R workspace, which is then loaded into the GUI directly. Figure 1: The VIM GUI and the Data menu.