The aplpack library contains the possibility to plot beautiful Chernoff faces with faces. symbols and TeachingDemos also offer the possibility to plot variations of these faces. But none of them allows to plot more than 15 dimensions (symbols allows two more dimensions for colours, but they are defined in an inconvenient way so that some faces turn out to be completely black, hiding other parts of the face). Is there a way in R (perhaps with another library) to plot more dimensions, e.g. by adding a body with limbs of different lengths or by using colours to visualise some of the dimensions? Maybe I've overseen something and the colours in aplpack can be mapped to variables as well?
The TeachingDemos package also has the ms.face function that works with the my.symbols function to create a scatterplot with the Chernoff Face as the symbol. This gives the original 15 values of the face, plus an x-coordinate and a y-coordinate; with my.symbols you can also specify a color (for the overall face, not individual features) and an overall size based on variables. That gives 19 dimensions, you could also vary the line width and style, but that will probably distort the plot more than help.
With that many dimensions I would probably go more for the star plots (symbols function) with the variables ordered based on a clustering procedure, or use some type of dimension reduction tool (principal components, grand tour, etc.)
Related
I would like to draw $3$ dimensional scatter plots, or more precisely I have a program that gives me the mass distribution in the unit cube with respect to a 3 dimensional equidistant grid. You can interpret this as a continuous relaxation of a $3$ dimensional assignment problem if you want.
Anyway this is just to give you a very brief background since my actual problem is not really concerned with the maths behind the procedure but with the visualization. I have:
$n$ points in the unit cube $[0,1]^3$
each of the $n$ points is assigned a "weight" between $0$ and $\frac1n$ (typically a lot of the weights coincide, if there are too many different values, i use the cut command to reduce the range to, say $60$ different values)
And I'd like to plot the $n$ points in a color which corresponds to their weight.
Now I found the rgl Package in R which allows me to do exactly that and also provides a very nice interactive plot window but it doesn't seem to allow a "col key" parameter, i.e. I cannot add a continuous color legend to my plot.
On the other hand the package plot3D provides a function to do a $3$ dimensional scatterplot and easily allows me to add the col key. However plot3D does not work with interactive plots but merely gives me the option to specify the angle at which I want to look at the cube. In a $3$D setting I strongly prefer the interactive alternative.
Now is there a way to automatically add a continuous color legend to an rgl plot? If not, do you know why this hasn't been implemented? Or would you solve my problem completely different altogether?
P.S. sorry for the formatting, I'm new to SO and the math environment "$" doesn't seem to work here.
The reason this hasn't been implemented is because until fairly recently it wasn't easy to have a static legend and a dynamic plot in the same window.
Now it's easy; there's a legend3d() function that might do what you want, but I think you probably want a different sort of legend than it will draw. If you know how to draw what you want in 2D, you can use the bgplot3d() function to put it in the background of your plot.
Both of those options give bitmapped legends. It would also be possible to do vector-based legends, but that would be quite a bit more work.
Problem definition
I need to produce a number of specific graphs, and on these graphs, highlight subsets of vertices (nodes) by drawing a contour/polygon/range around or over them (see image below).
A graph may have multiple of these contours/ranges, and they may overlap, iff one or more vertices belong to multiple subsets.
Given a graph of N vertices, any subset may be of size 1..N.
However, vertices not belonging to a subset must not be inside the contour (as that would be misleading, so that's priority no. 1). This is gist of my problem.
All these graphs happen to have the property that the ranges are continuous, as the data they represent covers only directly connected subsets of vertices.
All graphs will be undirected and connected (no unconnected vertices will ever be plotted).
Reproducible attempts
I am using R and the igraph package. I have already tried some solutions, but none of them work well enough.
First attempt, mark.groups in plot.igraph:
library(igraph)
g = make_graph("Frucht")
l = layout.reingold.tilford(g,1)
plot(g, layout=l, mark.groups = c(1,3,6,12,5), mark.shape=1)
# bad, vertex 11 should not be inside the contour
plot(g, layout=l, mark.groups = c(1,6,12,5,11), mark.shape=1)
# 3 should not be in; image below
# just choosing another layout here is not a generalizable solution
The plot.igraph calls igraph.polygon, which calls convex_hull (also igraph), which calls xspline. The results is, from what I understand, something called a convex hull (which otherwise looks very nice!), but for my purposes that is not precise enough, covering vertices that should not be covered.
Second attempt with contour. So I tried implementing my own version, based on the solution suggested here:
library(MASS)
xx <- runif(5, 0, 1);yy <- abs(xx)+rnorm(5,0,0.2)
plot(xx,yy, xlim=c( min(xx)-sd(xx),max(xx)+sd(xx)), ylim =c( min(yy)-sd(yy), max(yy)+sd(yy)))
dens2 <- kde2d(xx, yy, lims=c(min(xx)-sd(xx), max(xx)+sd(xx), min(yy)- sd(yy), max(yy)+sd(yy) ),h=c(bandwidth.nrd(xx)/1.5, bandwidth.nrd(xx)/ 1.5), n=50 )
contour(dens2, level=0.001, col="red", add=TRUE, drawlabels=F)
The contour plot looks in principle like something I could use, given enough tweaking of the bandwidth and level values (to make the contour snug enough so it doesn't cover any points outside the group). However, this solution has the drawback that when the level value is too small, the contour breaks (doesn't produce a continuous area) - so if I would go that way, controlling for continuity (and determining good bandwidth/level values on the fly) automatically should be implemented. Another problem is, I cannot quite see how could I plot the contour over the plots produced by igraph: the layout.* commands produce what looks like a coordinate matrix, but the coordinates do not match the axis coordinates on the plot:
# compare:
layout.reingold.tilford(g,1)
plot(g, layout=l, axes=T)
The question:
What would be a better way to achieve the plotting of such ranges on graphs (ideally igraphs) in R that would meet the criteria outlined above - ranges that include only the vertices that belong to their subset and exclude all else - while being continous ranges?
The solution I am looking for should be scalable to graphs of different sizes and layouts that I may need to create (so hand-tweaking each graph by hand using e.g. tkplot is not a good solution). I am aware that on some graphs with some vertex groups, meeting both the criteria will indeed be impossible in practise, but intuitively it should be possible to implement something that still works most of the time with smallish (10..20 vertices) and not-too-complex graphs (ideally it would be possible to detect and give a warning if a perfectly fitting range could not be plotted). Either an improvement of the mark.groups approach (not necessarily within the package, but using the hull-idea mentioned above), or something with contour or a similar suitable function, or suggesting something else entirely would be welcome, as long as it works (most of the time).
Update stemming from the discussion: a solution that only utilizes functions of core R or CRAN packages (not external software) is desirable, since I will eventually want to incorporate this functionality in a package.
Edit: specified the last paragraph as per the comments.
The comment area is not long enough to fit my answer there, so I'm putting this here, although I'd rather post it as a comment as it is not a full solution.
Quite a long throw, but the first thing that popped into my mind is support vector machines. The idea would be that you construct a support vector machine classifier that classifies your points into two groups (in or out) based on the coordinates of the vertices, using some non-linear kernel function (I would try the radial basis function). Then you plot the separating hyperplane of the trained support vector machine. One drawback is that the area that you obtain this way might be unbounded (i.e. go to infinity in some directions), so this idea definitely requires some further thinking, but at least that's one possible direction to go.
I am trying to plot quite large and dense networks (dput here). All I end up with is a bunch of overlapping dots, which does not really give me a sense of the structure or density of the network:
library(sna)
plot(data, mode = "fruchtermanreingold")
However, I have seen plots which utilizes fading to visualize the degree to which points overlap, e.g.:
How can I implement this "fading" in a plot of a graph?
Here's one way:
library(sna)
library(network)
source("modifieddatafromgist.R")
plot.network(data,
vertex.col="#FF000020",
vertex.border="#FF000020",
edge.col="#FFFFFF")
First, I added a data <- to the gist so it could be sourced.
Second, you need to ensure the proper library calls so the object classes are assigned correctly and the proper plot function will be used.
Third, you should use the extra parameters for the fruchtermanreingold layout (which is the default one for plot.network) to expand the area and increase the # of iterations.
Fourth, you should do a set.seed before the plot so folks can reproduce the output example.
Fifth, I deliberately removed cruft so you can see the point overlap, but you can change the alpha for both edges & vertices (and you should change the edge width, too) to get the result you want.
There's a ton of help in ?plot.network to assist you in configuring these options.
I am trying to illustrate a histogram of 33 different variables. Due to the number of variables I think "beside" different Colors I need to label each bar in a clear way, even using an arrow, if its doable.
I was wondering about
1) How can I define 33 distinct color in R
2) How can I label them, say vertical below X axis with a certain distance from each other to make my figure more clear.
I am using multhist function from Plotrix package, and for data you can image just 33 random vector with different length !
Thanks
As Chris mentioned, trying to distinguish 33 colours doesn't work for humans. You need to find a different plot type that doesn't rely on only colour.
Without a reproducible example, it is not possible to say what this plot should be, but here's some generic colour advice.
Use HCL colours rather the RGB or HSV. Read Escaping RGBland by Achim Zeileis for an explanation. There are some useful functions for generating palettes in the colorspace package.
If your variables are unordered categories (i.e., encoded as factors) then your colours should have different hues. (Use rainbow_hcl.)
If your variables are in some sort of order (ranges or ordered factors) then your colours should have different lightness or chroma. (Use sequential_hcl.) A variation on this is if they differ about some midpoint, in which case you need diverge_hcl.
You can define colors in R in any number of ways; try ?rainbow or ?greyscale for some suggestions
You could also look at all the colors here and just create a vector of your desired colors that you call inside your plot function.
Your problem though is that the human eye and the printing process has trouble distinguishing and reproducing that many distinct colors. See the documentation at the colorbrewer site for more information (and advice on picking colors).
Not sure I understand what your trying to do with the labels, but you can re-label an axis with a call to axis. See the documentation in ?axis.
I am in my way of finishing the graphs for a paper and decided (after a discussion on stats.stackoverflow), in order to transmit as much information as possible, to create the following graph that present both in the foreground the means and in the background the raw data:
However, one problem remains and that is overplotting. For example, the marked point looks like it reflects one data point, but in fact 5 data points exists with the same value at that place.
Therefore, I would like to know if there is a way to deal with overplotting in base graph using points as the function.
It would be ideal if e.g., the respective points get darker, or thicker or,...
Manually doing it is not an option (too many graphs and points like this). Furthermore, ggplot2 is also not what I want to learn to deal with this single problem (one reason is that I tend to like dual-axes what is not supprted in ggplot2).
Update: I wrote a function which automatically creates the above graphs and avoids overplotting by adding vertical or horizontal jitter (or both): check it out!
This function is now available as raw.means.plot and raw.means.plot2 in the plotrix package (on CRAN).
Standard approach is to add some noise to the data before plotting. R has a function jitter() which does exactly that. You could use it to add the necessary noise to the coordinates in your plot. eg:
X <- rep(1:10,10)
Z <- as.factor(sample(letters[1:10],100,replace=T))
plot(jitter(as.numeric(Z),factor=0.2),X,xaxt="n")
axis(1,at=1:10,labels=levels(Z))
Besides jittering, another good approach is alpha blending which you can obtain (on the graphics devices supporing it) as the fourth color parameter. I provided an example for 'overplotting' of two histograms in this SO question.
One additional idea for the general problem of showing the number of points is using a rug plot (rug function), this places small tick marks along the margin that can show how many points contribute (still use jittering or alpha blending for ties). This allows the actual points to show their true rather than jittered values, but the rug can then indicate which parts of the plot have more values.
For the example plot direct jittering or alpha blending is probably best, but in some other cases the rug plot can be useful.
You may also use sunflowerplot, while it would be hard to implement it here. I would use alpha-blending, as Dirk suggested.