Abstract
In this paper, contour plot is considered as a method to explore the structure of categorical data. For this purpose, the paper suggests a method to sort two-way contingency table with respect to the expected marginals. It is found that the suggested plot provides us with valuable information for the underlying data structure. Firstly, we can investigate independency between the categories by examining the differences of expected frequency contours and observed frequency contours. With the plot, we can also visually investigate the existence of outliers inherent in the data. These properties of the suggested contour plot will be demonstrated by several sets of real data.
