An introduction to R Graphics

Michael Friendly
SCS Short Course
March, 2018
http://datavis.ca/courses/RGraphics/
 Course outline
1. Overview of R graphics
2. Standard graphics in R
3. Grid & lattice graphics
4. ggplot2
 Outline: Session 1
• Session 1: Overview of R graphics, the big picture
 Getting started: R, R Studio, R package tools
 Roles of graphics in data analysis
• Exploration, analysis, presentation
 What can I do with R graphics?
• Anything you can think of!
• Standard data graphs, maps, dynamic, interactive graphics –
we’ll see a sampler of these
• R packages: many application-specific graphs
 Reproducible analysis and reporting
• knitr, R markdown
• R Studio

-#-
 Outline: Session 2
• Session 2: Standard graphics in R
 R object-oriented design

 Tweaking graphs: control graphic parameters

• Colors, point symbols, line styles
• Labels and titles
 Annotating graphs
• Add fitted lines, confidence envelopes
 Outline: Session 3
• Session 3: Grid & lattice graphics
 Another, more powerful “graphics engine”
 All standard plots, with more pleasing defaults
 Easily compose collections (“small multiples”)
from subsets of data
 vcd and vcdExtra packages: mosaic plots and
others for categorical data
 Outline: Session 4
• Session 4: ggplot2
 Most powerful approach to statistical graphs,
based on the “Grammar of Graphics”
 A graphics language, composed of layers, “geoms”
(points, lines, regions), each with graphical
“aesthetics” (color, size, shape)
 part of a workflow for “tidy” data manipulation
and graphics
 Resources: Books
Paul Murrell, R Graphics, 2nd Ed.
Covers everything: traditional (base) graphics, lattice, ggplot2, grid graphics, maps, network diagrams, …
R code for all figures: https://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~paul/RG2e/

Winston Chang, R Graphics Cookbook: Practical Recipes for Visualizing Data

Cookbook format, covering common graphing tasks; the main focus is on ggplot2
R code from book: http://www.cookbook-r.com/Graphs/
Download from: http://ase.tufts.edu/bugs/guide/assets/R%20Graphics%20Cookbook.pdf

Deepayn Sarkar, Lattice: Multivariate Visualization with R

R code for all figures: http://lmdvr.r-forge.r-project.org/

Hadley Wickham, ggplot2: Elegant graphics for data analysis, 2nd Ed.
1st Ed: Online, http://ggplot2.org/book/
ggplot2 Quick Reference: http://sape.inf.usi.ch/quick-reference/ggplot2/
Complete ggplot2 documentation: http://docs.ggplot2.org/current/

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 Resources: cheat sheets
R Studio provides a variety of handy cheat sheets for aspects of data analysis &
graphics See: https://www.rstudio.com/resources/cheatsheets/

Download, laminate,
paste them on your
fridge

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 Getting started: Tools
• To profit best from this course, you need to install
both R and R Studio on your computer

The basic R system: R console (GUI) & packages

Download: http://cran.us.r-project.org/
Add my recommended packages:
source(“http://datavis.ca/courses/RGraphics/R/install-pkgs.R”)

The R Studio IDE: analyze, write, publish

Download:
https://www.rstudio.com/products/rstudio/download/
Add: R Studio-related packages, as useful
 R package tools
Data prep: Tidy data makes analysis and graphing
much easier.
Packages: tidyverse, comprised of: tidyr, dplyr, lubridate, …

R graphics: general frameworks for making standard and custom graphics

Graphics frameworks: base graphics, lattice, ggplot2, rgl (3D)
Application packages: car (linear models), vcd (categorical data analysis), heplots
(multivariate linear models)

Publish: A variety of R packages make it easy to write and publish research reports
and slide presentations in various formats (HTML, Word, LaTeX, …), all within R
Studio

Web apps: R now has several powerful connections to preparing dynamic, web-
based data display and analysis applications.

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 Getting started: R Studio

command history
workspace: your variables

files
R console plots
(just like Rterm) packages
help
R Studio navigation

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R Studio projects
R Studio projects are a handy way to
organize your work

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 R Studio projects
An R Studio project for a research paper: R files (scripts), Rmd files (text, R “chunks”)

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 Graphics: Why plot your data?
• Three data sets with exactly the same bivariate summary
statistics:
 Same correlations, linear regression lines, etc
 Indistinguishable from standard printed output

Standard data r=0 but + 2 outliers Lurking variable?

 Roles of graphics in data analysis
• Graphs (& tables) are forms of communication:
 What is the audience?
 What is the message?
Analysis graphs: design to see Presentation graphs: design to attract
patterns, trends, aid the process of attention, make a point, illustrate a
data description, interpretation conclusion
Different graphs for different purposes
Exploratory graphs: many images for a narrow audience (you!)
Presentation graphs: single image for a large audience

Ah ha!
Ooh!

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 The 80-20 rule: Data analysis
• Often ~80% of data analysis time is spent on data preparation
and data cleaning
1. data entry, importing data set to R, assigning factor labels,
2. data screening: checking for errors, outliers, …
3. Fitting models & diagnostics: whoops! Something wrong, go back to step 1
• Whatever you can do to reduce this, gives more time for:
 Thoughtful analysis,
 Comparing models,
 Insightful graphics,
 Telling the story of your results and conclusions

This view of data analysis,

statistics and data vis is now
rebranded as “data science”

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 The 80-20 rule: Graphics
• Analysis graphs: Happily, 20% of effort can give 80% of a
desired result
 Default settings for plots often give something reasonable
 90-10 rule: Plot annotations (regression lines, smoothed curves, data
ellipses, …) add additional information to help understand patterns,
trends and unusual features, with only 10% more effort
• Presentation graphs: Sadly, 80% of total effort may be
required to give the remaining 20% of your final graph
 Graph title, axis and value labels: should be directly readable
 Grouping attributes: visually distinct, allowing for BW vs color
• color, shape, size of point symbols;
• color, line style, line width of lines
 Legends: Connect the data in the graph to interpretation
 Aspect ratio: need to consider the H x V size and shape
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 What can I do with R graphics?
A wide variety of standard plots (customized)
line graph: plot()
barchart()
hist()

3D plot: persp()
boxplot()
pie()
 Bivariate plots
R base graphics provide a wide variety of different plot types for bivariate data

The function plot(x, y) is generic. It produces different kinds of plots depending

on whether x and y are numeric or factors.

Some plotting
functions take a
matrix argument &
plot all columns

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 Bivariate plots
A number of specialized plot types are also available in base R graphics

Plot methods for factors and tables are designed to show the association between
categorical variables
The vcd & vcdExtra
packages provide more
and better plots for
categorical data

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 Mosaic plots
Similar to a grouped bar chart
Shows a frequency table with tiles,
area ~ frequency

> data(HairEyeColor)
> HEC <- margin.table(HairEyeColor, 1:2)
> HEC
Eye
Hair Brown Blue Hazel Green
Black 68 20 15 5
Brown 119 84 54 29
Red 26 17 14 14
Blond 7 94 10 16
> chisq.test(HEC)

Pearson's Chi-squared test

data: HEC
X-squared = 140, df = 9, p-value <2e-16

How to understand the association

between hair color and eye color?
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 Mosaic plots

Shade each tile in relation to the

contribution to the Pearson χ2
statistic
(oij − eij )2
χ2
= ∑
= r ∑ 2
ij
eij

> round(residuals(chisq.test(HEC)),2)
Eye
Hair Brown Blue Hazel Green
Black 4.40 -3.07 -0.48 -1.95
Brown 1.23 -1.95 1.35 -0.35
Red -0.07 -1.73 0.85 2.28
Blond -5.85 7.05 -2.23 0.61

Mosaic plots extend readily to 3-way + tables

They are intimately connected with loglinear models
See: Friendly & Meyer (2016), Discrete Data Analysis with R, http://ddar.datavis.ca/
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 Multivariate plots
The simplest case of multivariate plots
is a scatterplot matrix – all pairs of
bivariate plots

In R, the generic functions plot()

and pairs() have specific methods
for data frames

data(Duncan, package=“car”)
plot(~ prestige + income + education,
data=Duncan)
pairs(~ prestige + income + education,
data=Duncan)

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 Multivariate plots
These basic plots can be enhanced in
many ways to be more informative.

The function scatterplotMatrix() in the

car package provides
• univariate plots for each variable
• linear regression lines and loess
smoothed curves for each pair
• automatic labeling of noteworthy
observations (id.n=)

library(car)
scatterplotMatrix(~prestige + income + education, data=Duncan, id.n=2)

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 Multivariate plots: corrgrams
For larger data sets, visual
summaries are often more useful
than direct plots of the raw data

A corrgram (“correlation diagram”)

allows the data to be rendered in a
variety of ways, specified by panel
functions.

Here the main goal is to see how

mpg is related to the other
variables

See: Friendly, M. Corrgrams: Exploratory displays for correlation matrices. The American Statistician, 2002, 56, 316-324
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 Multivariate plots: corrgrams
For even larger data sets, more
abstract visual summaries are
necessary to see the patterns of
relationships.

This example uses schematic

ellipses to show the strength and
direction of correlations among
variables on a large collection of
Italian wines.

Here the main goal is to see how

the variables are related to each
other.
library(corrplot)
corrplot(cor(wine), tl.srt=30, method="ellipse", order="AOE")

See: Friendly, M. Corrgrams: Exploratory displays for correlation matrices. The American Statistician, 2002, 56, 316-324
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 Generalized pairs plots
Generalized pairs plots from the gpairs
package handle both categorical (C) and
quantitative (Q) variables in sensible ways

x y plot
Q Q scatterplot
C Q boxplot
Q C barcode
C C mosaic

library(gpairs)
data(Arthritis)
gpairs(Arthritis[, c(5, 2:5)], …)

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 Models: diagnostic plots
Linear statistical models (ANOVA,
regression), y = X β + ε, require some
assumptions: ε ~ N(0, σ2)

For a fitted model object, the plot()

method gives some useful diagnostic
plots:
• residuals vs. fitted: any pattern?
• Normal QQ: are residuals normal?
• scale-location: constant variance?
• residual-leverage: outliers?

duncan.mod <- lm(prestige ~ income + education, data=Duncan)

plot(duncan.mod)

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 Models: Added variable plots
The car package has many more functions for plotting linear model objects
Among these, added variable plots show the partial relations of y to each x, holding all
other predictors constant.
library(car)
avPlots(duncan.mod, id.n=2,ellipse=TRUE, …)

Each plot shows:

partial slope, βj
influential obs.

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 Models: Interpretation
Fitted models are often difficult to interpret from tables of coefficients

# add term for type of job

duncan.mod1 <- update(duncan.mod, . ~ . + type)
summary(duncan.mod1)

Call:
lm(formula = prestige ~ income + education + type, data = Duncan)

Coefficients:
Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
(Intercept) -0.18503 3.71377 -0.050 0.96051 How to understand
income
education
0.59755
0.34532
0.08936
0.11361
6.687 5.12e-08 ***
3.040 0.00416 **
effect of each
typeprof 16.65751 6.99301 2.382 0.02206 * predictor?
typewc -14.66113 6.10877 -2.400 0.02114 *
---
Signif. codes: 0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1

Residual standard error: 9.744 on 40 degrees of freedom

Multiple R-squared: 0.9131, Adjusted R-squared: 0.9044
F-statistic: 105 on 4 and 40 DF, p-value: < 2.2e-16

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 Models: Effect plots
Fitted models are more easily interpreted by plotting the predicted values.
Effect plots do this nicely, making plots for each high-order term, controlling for others

library(effects)
duncan.eff1 <- allEffects(duncan.mod1)
plot(duncan.eff1)

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 Models: Coefficient plots
Sometimes you need to report or display the coefficients from a fitted model.
A plot of coefficients with CIs is sometimes more effective than a table.

library(coefplot)
duncan.mod2 <- lm(prestige ~ income * education, data=Duncan)
coefplot(duncan.mod2, intercept=FALSE, lwdInner=2, lwdOuter=1,
title="Coefficient plot for duncan.mod2")

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Coefficient plots become
increasingly useful as:
(a) models become more complex
(b) we have several models to family income - wife's income
compare
log wage rate for working women

This plot compares three different husband's college attendance

models for women’s labor force
participation fit to data from Mroz
(1987) in the car package wife's college attendance

This makes it relatively easy to see

(a) which terms are important
number of children 6-18
(b) how models differ

number of children 5 years +

This example from: https://www.r-statistics.com/2010/07/visualization-of-regression-coefficients-in-r/

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 3D graphics
R has a wide variety of features and
packages that support 3D graphics

This example illustrates the concept

of an interaction between predictors
in a linear regression model

It uses:
lattice::wireframe(z ~ x + y, …)

The basic plot is “printed” 36 times

rotated 10o about the z axis to
produce 36 PNG images.

The ImageMagick utility is used to

convert these to an animated GIF
graphic z = 10 + .5x +.3y + .2 x*y

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 3D graphics: code
1. Generate data for the model z = 10 + .5x +.3y + .2 x*y
b0 <- 10 # intercept
b1 <- .5 # x coefficient
b2 <- .3 # y coefficient
int12 <- .2 # x*y coefficient
g <- expand.grid(x = 1:20, y = 1:20)
g$z <- b0 + b1*g$x + b2*g$y + int12*g$x*g$y

2. Make one 3D plot

library(lattice)
wireframe(z ~ x * y, data = g)

3. Create a set of PNG images, rotating around the z axis

png(file="example%03d.png", width=480, height=480)
for (i in seq(0, 350 ,10)){
print(wireframe(z ~ x * y, data = g,
screen = list(z = i, x = -60), drape=TRUE))}
dev.off()

4. Convert PNGs to GIF using ImageMagik

system("convert -delay 40 example*.png animated_3D_plot.gif")

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 3D graphics

The rgl package is the most general for

drawing 3D graphs in R.
Other R packages use this for 3D statistical
graphs

This example uses car::scatter3d() to

show the data and fitted response surface
for the multiple regression model for the
Duncan data

scatter3d(prestige ~ income + education,

data=Duncan, id.n=2, revolutions=2)

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 Statistical animations
Statistical concepts can often be
illustrated in a dynamic plot of some
process.

This example illustrates the idea of

least squares fitting of a regression
line.

As the slope of the line is varied, the

right panel shows the residual sum
of squares.

This plot was done using the animate

package

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 Maps and spatial visualizations
Spatial visualization in R, combines map data sets, statistical models for spatial data,
and a growing number of R packages for map-based display

This example, from Paul Murrell’s R

Graphics book shows a basic map of
Brazil, with provinces and their capitals,
shaded by region of the country.

Murrell, Fig. 14.5

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 Maps and spatial visualizations
Dr. John Snow’s map of cholera in
London, 1854

Enhanced in R in the HistData

package to make Snow’s point

Portion of Snow’s map:

library(HistData)
SnowMap(density=TRUE,
main=“Snow's Cholera Map, Death Intensity”)

Contours of death densities are calculated using

a 2d binned kernel density estimate, bkde2D()
from the KernSmooth package 41
 Maps and spatial visualizations
Dr. John Snow’s map of cholera in
London, 1854

Enhanced in R in the HistData

package to make Snow’s point

These and other historical

examples come from Friendly &
Wainer, The Origin of Graphical
Species, Harvard Univ. Press, in
progress.

SnowMap(density=TRUE,
main="Snow's Cholera Map with Pump Neighborhoods“)

Neighborhoods are the Voronoi polygons of the

map closest to each pump, calculated using the
deldir package.
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 Diagrams: Trees & Graphs
A number of R packages are specialized to draw particular types of diagrams.
igraph is designed for network diagrams of nodes and edges

library(igraph)
tree <- graph.tree(10) full <- graph.full(10)
tree <- set.edge.attribute(tree, "color", value="black") fullIgraph <- set.edge.attribute(full, "color",
plot(treeIgraph, value="black")
layout=layout.reingold.tilford(tree, plot(full, layout=layout.circle)
root=1, flip.y=FALSE))

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 Diagrams: Network diagrams
graphvis (http://www.graphviz.org/) is a comprehensive program for drawing
network diagrams and abstract graphs. It uses a simple notation to describe nodes
and edges.
The Rgraphviz package (from Bioconductor) provides an R interface

This example, from Murrell’s R Graphics

book, shows a node for each package that
directly depends on the main R graphics
packages.

An interactive version could provide “tool

tips”, allowing exploring the relationships
among packages

Murrell, Fig. 15.5

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 Diagrams: Flow charts
The diagram package:

Functions for drawing diagrams with

various shapes, lines/arrows, text
boxes, etc.

Flow chart about understanding flow charts (after

http://xkcd.com/518 ). From: Murrell, Fig 15.10
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Path diagrams: structural equation models
Similar diagrams are used to display structural equation models as “path diagrams”
The sem and laavan packages have pathDiagram() functions to draw a proposed or
fitted model.
They use the DiagrammeR package to do the drawing.

library(sem)
union.mod <- specifyEquations(covs="x1, x2", text="
y1 = gam12*x2
y2 = beta21*y1 + gam22*x2
y3 = beta31*y1 + beta32*y2 + gam31*x1
")
union.sem <- sem(union.mod, union, N=173)
pathDiagram(union.sem,
edge.labels="values",
file="union-sem1",
min.rank=c("x1", "x2"))

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 Dynamically updated data visualizations
The wind map app, http://hint.fm/wind/ is one of a growing number of R-based
applications that harvests data from standard sources, and presents a visualization

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 Web scraping: CRAN package history
R has extensive facilities for extracting and processing information obtained from web
pages. The XML package is one useful tool for this purpose.

This example:
• downloads information about all R
packages from the CRAN web site,
• finds & counts all of those available for
each R version,
• plots the counts with ggplot2, adding a
smoothed curve, and plot annotations

On Jan. 27, 2017, the number of R

packages on CRAN reached 10,000
Code from: https://git.io/vy4wS

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shiny: dynamic app showing downloads of R packages
https://gallery.shinyapps.io/087-crandash/
Reproducible analysis & reporting
R Studio, together with the knitr
and rmarkdown packages provide
an easy way to combine writing,
analysis, and R output into
complete documents

.Rmd files are just text files, using

rmarkdown markup and knitr to
run R on “code chunks”

A given document can be

rendered in different output
formats:

50
 Output formats and templates
The integration of R, R Studio, knitr,
rmarkdown and other tools is now
highly advanced.

My last book was written

entirely in R Studio, using .Rnw
syntax → LaTeX → PDF →
camera ready copy

The ggplot2 book was written

using .Rmd format.

The bookdown package makes

it easier to manage a book-
length project – TOC, fig/table
#s, cross-references, etc.

Templates are available for APA papers,

slides, handouts, entire web sites, etc.
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 rmarkdown basics
rmarkdown uses simple formatting for all standard document elements

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 R code chunks
R code chunks are run by knitr, and the results are inserted in the output document

There are many

options for controlling
the details of chunk
output – numbers,
tables, graphs

Choose the output

format:

An R chunk:
```{r name, options}
# R code here
```

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The R Markdown Cheat Sheet provides most of the details
https://www.rstudio.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/rmarkdown-cheatsheet-2.0.pdf

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 R notebooks
Often, you just want to “compile” an R script, and get the output embedded in the
result, in HTML, Word, or PDF. Just type Ctrl-Shift-K or tap the Compile Report button

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 Summary & Homework
• Today has been mostly about an overview of R
graphics, but with emphasis on:
 R, R Studio, R package tools
 Roles of graphics in data analysis,
 A small gallery of examples of different kinds of graphic applications in
R; only small samples of R code
 Work flow: How to use R productively in analysis & reporting
• Next week: start on skills with traditional graphics
• Homework:
 Find one or more examples of data graphs from your research area
• What are the graphic elements: points, lines, areas, regions, text, labels, ???
• How could they be “described” to software such as R?
• How could they be improved?

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