Galaxies, trees, and influenza cases have something in common: they tend to occur in clusters. The issue of how to model clustered spatial patterns is thus of interest to a variety of scientific disciplines.

We have a growing interest in using our favorite tools (R and Mathematica) to build web interfaces to interactively explore and visualize data. Our last 5 posts have involved interactive tools, namely Mathematica’s computable document format and R’s new Shiny package.

Volume rendering, a new feature in Mathematica 9, provides an efficient way to visualize very large data sets. I first learned of this feature from reading Jeffery Bryant’s post on the Wolfram blog.