A 3d wireframe plot is a type of graph that is used to display a surface – geographic data is an example of where this type of graph would be used or it could be used to display a fitted model with more than one explanatory variable. These plots are related to contour plots which are the two dimensional equivalent. Read the rest of this entry »
Summarising data using box and whisker plots
April 25th, 2010A box and whisker plot is a type of graphical display that can be used to summarise a set of data based on the five number summary of this data. The summary statistics used to create a box and whisker plot are the median of the data, the lower and upper quartiles (25% and 75%) and the minimum and maximum values. Read the rest of this entry »
Summarising data using scatter plots
April 18th, 2010A scatter plot is a graph used to investigate the relationship between two variables in a data set. The x and y axes are used for the values of the two variables and a symbol on the graph represents the combination for each pair of values in the data set. This type of graph is used in many common situations and can convey a lot of useful information. Read the rest of this entry »
Summarising data using histograms
April 11th, 2010The histogram is a standard type of graphic used to summarise univariate data where the range of values in the data set is divided into regions and a bar (usually vertical) is plotted in each of these regions with height proportional to the frequency of observations in that region. In some cases the proportion of data points in each region is shown instead of counts. Read the rest of this entry »
Summarising data using dot plots
March 26th, 2010A dot plot is a type of display that compares counts, frequencies, totals or other summary measures for a series of categories. The dot plot can be arranged with the categories either on the vertical or horizontal axis of the display to allow comparising between the different categories as well as comparison within categories where there are multiple symbols used to denote say different years. Read the rest of this entry »
A Gallery of Graphs produced using R
September 12th, 2009The R environment for Statistical Analysis has strong facilities for producing high quality graphical output. There are many books and electronic documents that demonstrate examples of effective ways to display data graphically. To get an feel for the range of display that could be used it is worthwhile visiting the R Graph Gallery. Read the rest of this entry »
Using Histograms to Summarise Data
June 8th, 2009It is not only possible to use tabular displays to summarise a data set and we will often be interested in using a graphical display as this might be a more effective way to visualise our data rather than using statistics such as the mean or standard deviation. Read the rest of this entry »
Plotting Probability Distributions
June 2nd, 2009There are many distributions that are available within the base R Statistical System and it is possibly to use these functions to visualise the density or cumulative density functions for a distribution with a given set of parameters. Read the rest of this entry »
