Multivariate Data Visualization with R

An important subset of statistical data comes in the form of tables. Tables usually record the frequency or proportion of observations that fall into a particular category or combination of categories. They could also encode some other summary measure such as a rate (of binary events) or mean (of a continuous variable). In R, tables are usually represented by arrays of one (vectors), two (matrices), or more dimensions. To distinguish them from other vectors and arrays, they often have class “table”. The R functions table() and xtabs() can be used to create tables from raw data.

A scatter plot graphs two variables directly against each other in a Cartesian coordinate system. It is a simple graphic in the sense that the data are directly encoded without being summarized in any way; often the aspects that the user needs to worry about most are graphical ones such as whether to join the points by a line, what colors to use, and so on. Depending on the purpose, scatter plots can also be enhanced in several ways. In this chapter, we go over some of the variants supported by panel.xyplot(), which is the default panel function for both xyplot() and splom() (under the alias panel.splom()).

Scatter-plot matrices, produced by splom(), are exactly what the name suggests; they are a matrix of pairwise scatter plots given two or more variables. Conditioning is possible, but it is more common to call splom() with a data frame as its first argument.

Like scatter-plot matrices, parallel coordinates plots are hypervariate in nature, that is, they show relationships between an arbitrary number of variables. Their design is related to univariate scatter plots; in fact, they are basically univariate scatter plots of all variables of interest stacked parallel to each other (vertically in the implementation in lattice), with values that correspond to the same observation linked by line segments.

Trivariate displays encode three primary variables in a panel. There are four high-level functions in lattice that produce trivariate displays: cloud() creates three-dimensional scatter plots of unstructured trivariate data, whereas levelplot(), contourplot(), and wireframe() render surfaces or two dimensional tables evaluated on a systematic rectangular grid. Of these, cloud() and wireframe() are similar in that they both create two-dimensional projections of three-dimensional constructs, and they share several common arguments that control the details of the projection.

We begin with cloud(), which produces three-dimensional scatter plots. Most of the discussion in this section about projection and how to control it in cloud() applies to wireframe() as well.

The methods we used to plot regression surfaces using wireframe() can be easily adapted to mathematical surfaces.

Graphical parameters are often critical in determining the effectiveness of a plot. Such parameters include obvious ones such as colors, symbols, line types, and fonts for the various elements of a graph, as well as more subtle ones such as the length of tick marks or the amount of space separating different components of the graph. The parameters used in lattice displays are highly customizable. Many of them can be controlled directly by specifying suitable arguments in a high-level function call. Most derive their default values from a system of common global settings that can also be modified by the user. The latter approach has two primary benefits: it allows good global defaults to be specified, and it provides a consistent “look and feel” to lattice graphics while letting the user retain ultimate control.