What if I told you there was a new drug that has been proven to DOUBLE your changes of getting over a cough? Sounds great doesn’t it? Well, before we (ahem) cough up the dough for drug X, let’s take a closer look at the clinical trial data:

First, let’s look at the results from the placebo condition:

Ok, now let’s look at the results from the group of people given Drug X

Hmmm, as we can see from the plots, while the users of Drug X were indeed twice as likely to get over the cold, they were also much more likely to develop side-effects.

Frequency grid displays such as these can help people understand risks. But creating the plots themselves is a bit of a pain. To solve this, I wrote an R function called Icon.Array. A beta version of the function implemented in a Shiny app is located at https://ndphillips.shinyapps.io/IconArray_App/.