What I'm looking for is best explained by a picture: A line that "contours" the maxima of my points (like giving the "skyline" of the plot). I have a plot of scattered points with dense, (mostly) unique x coordinates (not equally distributed in either axis). I want a red line surfacing this plot:
What I've tried/thought of so far is, that a simple "draw as line" approach fails due to the dense nature of the data with unique x values and a lot of local maxima and minima (basically at every point). The same fact makes a mere "get maximum"-approach impossible.
Therefore I'm asking: Is there some kind of smoothing option for a plot? Or any existing "skyline" operator for a plot?
I am specifically NOT looking for a "contour plot" or a "skyline plot" (as in Bayesian skylineplot) - the terms would actually describe what I want, but unfortunately are already used for other things.
Here is a minimal version of what I'm working with so far, a negative example of lines not giving the desired results. I uploaded sample data here.
load("xy_lidarProfiles.RData")
plot(x, y,
xlab="x", ylab="y", # axis
pch = 20, # point marker style (1 - 20)
asp = 1 # aspect of x and y ratio
)
lines(x, y, type="l", col = "red") # makes a mess
You will get close to your desired result if you order() by x values. What you want then is a running maximum, which TTR::runMax() provides.
plot(x[order(x)], y[order(x)], pch=20)
lines(x[order(x)], TTR::runMax(y[order(x)], n=10), col="red", lwd=2)
You may adjust the window with the n= parameter.
Scatter plots are useless when number of plots is large.
So, e.g., using normal approximation, we can get the contour plot.
My question: Is there any package to implement the contour plot from scatter plot.
Thank you #G5W !! I can do it !!
You don't offer any data, so I will respond with some artificial data,
constructed at the bottom of the post. You also don't say how much data
you have although you say it is a large number of points. I am illustrating
with 20000 points.
You used the group number as the plotting character to indicate the group.
I find that hard to read. But just plotting the points doesn't show the
groups well. Coloring each group a different color is a start, but does
not look very good.
plot(x,y, pch=20, col=rainbow(3)[group])
Two tricks that can make a lot of points more understandable are:
1. Make the points transparent. The dense places will appear darker. AND
2. Reduce the point size.
plot(x,y, pch=20, col=rainbow(3, alpha=0.1)[group], cex=0.8)
That looks somewhat better, but did not address your actual request.
Your sample picture seems to show confidence ellipses. You can get
those using the function dataEllipse from the car package.
library(car)
plot(x,y, pch=20, col=rainbow(3, alpha=0.1)[group], cex=0.8)
dataEllipse(x,y,factor(group), levels=c(0.70,0.85,0.95),
plot.points=FALSE, col=rainbow(3), group.labels=NA, center.pch=FALSE)
But if there are really a lot of points, the points can still overlap
so much that they are just confusing. You can also use dataEllipse
to create what is basically a 2D density plot without showing the points
at all. Just plot several ellipses of different sizes over each other filling
them with transparent colors. The center of the distribution will appear darker.
This can give an idea of the distribution for a very large number of points.
plot(x,y,pch=NA)
dataEllipse(x,y,factor(group), levels=c(seq(0.15,0.95,0.2), 0.995),
plot.points=FALSE, col=rainbow(3), group.labels=NA,
center.pch=FALSE, fill=TRUE, fill.alpha=0.15, lty=1, lwd=1)
You can get a more continuous look by plotting more ellipses and leaving out the border lines.
plot(x,y,pch=NA)
dataEllipse(x,y,factor(group), levels=seq(0.11,0.99,0.02),
plot.points=FALSE, col=rainbow(3), group.labels=NA,
center.pch=FALSE, fill=TRUE, fill.alpha=0.05, lty=0)
Please try different combinations of these to get a nice picture of your data.
Additional response to comment: Adding labels
Perhaps the most natural place to add group labels is the centers of the
ellipses. You can get that by simply computing the centroids of the points in each group. So for example,
plot(x,y,pch=NA)
dataEllipse(x,y,factor(group), levels=c(seq(0.15,0.95,0.2), 0.995),
plot.points=FALSE, col=rainbow(3), group.labels=NA,
center.pch=FALSE, fill=TRUE, fill.alpha=0.15, lty=1, lwd=1)
## Now add labels
for(i in unique(group)) {
text(mean(x[group==i]), mean(y[group==i]), labels=i)
}
Note that I just used the number as the group label, but if you have a more elaborate name, you can change labels=i to something like
labels=GroupNames[i].
Data
x = c(rnorm(2000,0,1), rnorm(7000,1,1), rnorm(11000,5,1))
twist = c(rep(0,2000),rep(-0.5,7000), rep(0.4,11000))
y = c(rnorm(2000,0,1), rnorm(7000,5,1), rnorm(11000,6,1)) + twist*x
group = c(rep(1,2000), rep(2,7000), rep(3,11000))
You can use hexbin::hexbin() to show very large datasets.
#G5W gave a nice dataset:
x = c(rnorm(2000,0,1), rnorm(7000,1,1), rnorm(11000,5,1))
twist = c(rep(0,2000),rep(-0.5,7000), rep(0.4,11000))
y = c(rnorm(2000,0,1), rnorm(7000,5,1), rnorm(11000,6,1)) + twist*x
group = c(rep(1,2000), rep(2,7000), rep(3,11000))
If you don't know the group information, then the ellipses are inappropriate; this is what I'd suggest:
library(hexbin)
plot(hexbin(x,y))
which produces
If you really want contours, you'll need a density estimate to plot. The MASS::kde2d() function can produce one; see the examples in its help page for plotting a contour based on the result. This is what it gives for this dataset:
library(MASS)
contour(kde2d(x,y))
This code will create two plots.
a = c(0,1,1,2,2,2,2,2,3,3,3,3,3,3,4,4,4,4,5,5,5,6,6,6,6,6,7,7,7,7,7,7,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,9,9,9)
b = hist(a, freq=FALSE)
dev.new()
plot(b)
The first is a histogram of the density (which I want to have). But if one would like to plot b later on, it will always be plotted as frequency.
Is there any chance to plot the histogram as density past initialisation?
You just need to change the argument in plot
plot(b,freq=FALSE)
How to plot the density of a single column dataset as dots? For example
x <- c(1:40)
On the same plot using the same scale of the x-axis and y-axis, how to add another data set as line format which represent the density of another data that represents the equation of
y = exp(-x)
to the plot?
The equation is corrected to be y = exp(-x).
So, by doing plot(density(x)) or plot(density(y)), I got two separated figures. How to add them in the same axis and using dots for x, smoothed line for y?
You can add a line to a plot with the lines() function. Your code, modified to do what you asked for, is the following:
x <- 1:40
y <- exp(-x)
plot(density(x), type = "p")
lines(density(y))
Note that we specified the plot to give us points with the type parameter and then added the density curve for y with lines. The help pages for ?plot, ?par, ?lines would be some insightful reading. Also, check out the R Graph Gallery to view some more sophisticated graphs that generally have the source code attached to them.
This question already has an answer here:
How To Avoid Density Curve Getting Cut Off In Plot
(1 answer)
Closed 6 years ago.
newbie here. I have a script to create graphs that has a bit that goes something like this:
png(Test.png)
ht=hist(step[i],20)
curve(insert_function_here,add=TRUE)
I essentially want to plot a curve of a distribution over an histogram. My problem is that the axes limits are apparently set by the histogram instead of the curve, so that the curve sometimes gets out of the Y axis limits. I have played with par("usr"), to no avail. Is there any way to set the axis limits based on the maximum values of either the histogram or the curve (or, in the alternative, of the curve only)?? In case this changes anything, this needs to be done within a for loop where multiple such graphs are plotted and within a series of subplots (par("mfrow")).
Inspired by other answers, this is what i ended up doing:
curve(insert_function_here)
boundsc=par("usr")
ht=hist(A[,1],20,plot=FALSE)
par(usr=c(boundsc[1:2],0,max(boundsc[4],max(ht$counts))))
plot(ht,add=TRUE)
It fixes the bounds based on the highest of either the curve or the histogram.
You could determine the mx <- max(curve_vector, ht$counts) and set ylim=(0, mx), but I rather doubt the code looks like that since [] is not a proper parameter passing idiom and step is not an R plotting function, but rather a model selection function. So I am guessing this is code in Matlab or some other idiom. In R, try this:
set.seed(123)
png("Test.png")
ht=hist(rpois(20,1), plot=FALSE, breaks=0:10-0.1)
# better to offset to include discrete counts that would otherwise be at boundaries
plot(round(ht$breaks), dpois( round(ht$breaks), # plot a Poisson density
mean(ht$counts*round(ht$breaks[-length(ht$breaks)]))),
ylim=c(0, max(ht$density)+.1) , type="l")
plot(ht, freq=FALSE, add=TRUE) # plot the histogram
dev.off()
You could plot the curve first, then compute the histogram with plot=FALSE, and use the plot function on the histogram object with add=TRUE to add it to the plot.
Even better would be to calculate the the highest y-value of the curve (there may be shortcuts to do this depending on the nature of the curve) and the highest bar in the histogram and give this value to the ylim argument when plotting the histogram.