I don’t really care for the name “marimekko” or “mosaic,” but I do like this type of plot as a means of illustrating proportions in nested categorical data, or as an alternative to the parallel time series plots discussed... [Read more...]

As we noted last month, the new Themes feature in ggplot2 helps you customize the design of R charts to your liking. Now, R user Jeffrey Arnold has built on this feature to create standardized themes to make R graphics looks like those from major publications and other software systems. ... [Read more...]

In developing plots, I often use color (or “colour” in ggplot2 parlance) to reflect values of a third, non-X/Y, variable. Depending on the distribution of this Z variable, however, the effective color range can be narrow, making it difficul... [Read more...]

ggplot2 has just hit 0.9.2, and with the change comes a new theme system. Previous versions of ggplot2 offered a theme_blank(), which was a stripped-down, essentially blank plotting canvas, but it is now deprecated. github user jrnold has produced a s... [Read more...]

In our previous post, we used a quick-and-dirty method for ordering the axes on our heatmap. It has been pointed out to me that There is a Package for That (which is my nominee for a new slogan for R — not that it needs a slogan). seriation offe... [Read more...]

Last month we shared an visualization showing the changing extent of Arctic sea-ice. This visualization by the multinational Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) switches the view to the Southern pole and takes the visualization to a whole new level, by animating it in 3-D: The ... [Read more...]

Featuring the lovely “spectral” palette from Colorbrewer. This really just serves as a reminder of how to do four things I frequently want to do: Make a heatmap of some kind of matrix, often a square correlation matrix Reorder a factor vari... [Read more...]

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post on producing visually-weighted regression plots, here is some code which illustrates the production of similar plots, but using Zelig’s convenient modeling and simulation functions. This code was produced... [Read more...]

There has recently been a lot of discussion of so-called “visually-weighted regression” plots. Folk hero Hadley Wickham suggests that such plots would be easy to implement with ggplot2, and so I have attempted to prove him right. The approa... [Read more...]

Today's guest post comes from Revolution Analytics data scientist Luba Gloukhov — ed. As a big fan of R’s ever-expanding geospatial plotting capabilities, I jumped at the chance create a map using The Million Song Dataset (MSD). For each of the 10,000 songs in the million song subset containing non-missing latitudes & ... [Read more...]

Today's guest post comes from Winston Chang, a software developer at RStudio — ed. When it comes to making figures in R, you can use any font you like, as long as it's Helvetica, Times, or Courier. Using other fonts that are installed on your computer can seem an impossible task, ... [Read more...]

Today's guest post comes to us from Andrew Winterman, Data Designer at data visualization company Persiscopic. He shares with us the process of using the R language and other tools to create an interactive data application for a client — ed. The Hewlett Foundation contacted us a few months ago because ... [Read more...]

Today's guest post comes from Garrett Grolemund, a software developer at RStudio — ed. I think of graphs as a type of visual summary for data. Yet I rarely see graphs used this way within visualizations. Consider tile plots. They group data into 2d bins and then summarize each group with ... [Read more...]

Today's guest post is by Naomi Robbins, author of the Effective Graphs blog — ed. I write a blog on effective graphs for Forbes. David Smith invited me to write a guest post here that was a roundup of some of my Forbes posts where R was used. My use of ... [Read more...]

Today's guest post comes from Nathan Yau. Nathan runs FlowingData, a site on statistics and visualization, and is the author of Visualize This. Years ago, when I started FlowingData, the purpose of the blog was to catalog and think out loud about visualization, in its many varieties. In the beginning ... [Read more...]

An update to the ggplot2 "grammar of graphics" package for R is now available on CRAN. This version introduces "Themes" for ggplot2 charts, and makes it possible to define and re-use your own preferences for title fonts and sizes, tick marks, grid color, etc. The system is heirarchically defined, so ... [Read more...]

It's a wonderful thing when people make interesting data sets available to the public. When Thomas Jones wrote a paper in Econometrics about the growth of US retail giant Walmart, he made the data he collected about every Walmart store opening in history (location and date) available to the public. ... [Read more...]

RealClimate.org used the R language and data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center to create this chart showing the extent of Arctic sea-ice in each year since satellite observations began in 1978, and the current extent of ice coverage (in red). Even though there are several weeks of ... [Read more...]

If you haven't made the plunge yet to making R graphics with Hadley Wickham's ggplot2 package, his "ggplot2 basics" slides (from the recent Introduction to Data Visualization and Analysis course at JSM) is a good place to start. Once you get the hang of the "grammar of graphics" notation, you'll ... [Read more...]

The Environmental Performance Index (EPI) ranks countries on performance indicators for environmental public health and ecosystem vitality. Yale University hosts the EPI website, which was used to present the 2012 EPI Rankings to world leaders at the 2012 World Economic Forum at Davos. The Country Profiles section of the website allowed members ... [Read more...]