Graphical Data

Analysis with R

Antony Unwin
University of Augsburg
Germany

K25332_FM.indd 5 3/4/15 4:04 AM

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Contents

Preface xi

1 Setting the Scene 1

1.1 Graphics in action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

1.2 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.3 What is Graphical Data Analysis (GDA)? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
1.4 Using this book, the R code in it, and the book’s webpage . . . . . 14

2 Brief Review of the Literature and Background Materials 19

2.1 Literature review . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

2.2 Interactive graphics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
2.3 Other graphics software . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
2.4 Websites . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
2.5 Datasets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
2.6 Statistical texts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25

3 Examining Continuous Variables 27

3.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
3.2 What features might continuous variables have? . . . . . . . . . . . 29
3.3 Looking for features . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
3.4 Comparing distributions by subgroups . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
3.5 What plots are there for individual continuous variables? . . . . . . 46
3.6 Plot options . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
3.7 Modelling and testing for continuous variables . . . . . . . . . . . 48

4 Displaying Categorical Data 53

4.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
4.2 What features might categorical variables have? . . . . . . . . . . . 56
4.3 Nominal data—no fixed category order . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
4.4 Ordinal data—fixed category order . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
4.5 Discrete data—counts and integers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
4.6 Formats, factors, estimates, and barcharts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
4.7 Modelling and testing for categorical variables . . . . . . . . . . . 71

vii
viii

5 Looking for Structure: Dependency Relationships and Associations 75

5.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
5.2 What features might be visible in scatterplots? . . . . . . . . . . . 77
5.3 Looking at pairs of continuous variables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
5.4 Adding models: lines and smooths . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
5.5 Comparing groups within scatterplots . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
5.6 Scatterplot matrices for looking at many pairs of variables . . . . . 88
5.7 Scatterplot options . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
5.8 Modelling and testing for relationships between variables . . . . . 94

6 Investigating Multivariate Continuous Data 99

6.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
6.2 What is a parallel coordinate plot (pcp)? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
6.3 Features you can see with parallel coordinate plots . . . . . . . . . 102
6.4 Interpreting clustering results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
6.5 Parallel coordinate plots and time series . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
6.6 Parallel coordinate plots for indices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
6.7 Options for parallel coordinate plots . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
6.8 Modelling and testing for multivariate continuous data . . . . . . . 127
6.9 Parallel coordinate plots and comparing model results . . . . . . . 127

7 Studying Multivariate Categorical Data 131

7.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131

7.2 Data on the sinking of the Titanic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132
7.3 What is a mosaicplot? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
7.4 Different mosaicplots for different questions of interest . . . . . . . 140
7.5 Which mosaicplot is the right one? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148
7.6 Additional options . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
7.7 Modelling and testing for multivariate categorical data . . . . . . . 151

8 Getting an Overview 155

8.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155

8.2 Many individual displays . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159
8.3 Multivariate overviews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162
8.4 Multivariate overviews for categorical variables . . . . . . . . . . . 168
8.5 Graphics by group . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170
8.6 Modelling and testing for overviews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174
 ix

9 Graphics and Data Quality: How Good Are the Data? 177

9.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177

9.2 Missing values . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178
9.3 Outliers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183
9.4 Modelling and testing for data quality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193

10 Comparisons, Comparisons, Comparisons 197

10.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197

10.2 Making comparisons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199
10.3 Making visual comparisons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202
10.4 Comparing group effects graphically . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 208
10.5 Comparing rates visually . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212
10.6 Graphics for comparing many subsets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 214
10.7 Graphics principles for comparisons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 216
10.8 Modelling and testing for comparisons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 218

11 Graphics for Time Series 223

11.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223

11.2 Graphics for a single time series . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 224
11.3 Multiple series . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 226
11.4 Special features of time series . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233
11.5 Alternative graphics for time series . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237
11.6 R classes and packages for time series . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238
11.7 Modelling and testing time series . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238

12 Ensemble Graphics and Case Studies 243

12.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243

12.2 What is an ensemble of graphics? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 246
12.3 Combining different views—a case study example . . . . . . . . . 248
12.4 Case studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 252

13 Some Notes on Graphics with R 257

13.1 Graphics systems in R . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257

13.2 Loading datasets and packages for graphical analysis . . . . . . . . 258
13.3 Graphics conventions in statistics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 258
13.4 What is a graphic anyway? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259
13.5 Options for all graphics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261
13.6 Some R graphics advice and coding tips . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 264
13.7 Other graphics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271
13.8 Large datasets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 272
13.9 Perfecting graphics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273
x

14 Summary 275

14.1 Data analysis and graphics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 275

14.2 Key features of GDA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 276
14.3 Strengths and weaknesses of GDA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 276
14.4 Recommendations for GDA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277

References 279
General index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 291
Datasets index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 295
Preface

Graphical Data Analysis is useful for data cleaning, exploring data structure, de-
tecting outliers and unusual groups, identifying trends and clusters, spotting local
patterns, evaluating modelling output, and presenting results. It is essential for ex-
ploratory data analysis and data mining. There are several fine books on graphics us-
ing R, such as “ggplot2” [Wickham, 2009], “Lattice” [Sarkar, 2008], and “R Graph-
ics” [Murrell, 2011]). These books concentrate on how you draw graphics in R. This
book concentrates on why you draw graphics and which graphics to draw (and uses
R to do so).
The target readership includes anyone carrying out data analyses who wants to
understand their data using graphics. The book can be used as the primary textbook
for a course in Graphical Data Analysis or as an accompanying text for a statistics
course. Prerequisites for the book are an interest in data analysis and some basic
knowledge of R.
The main aim of the book is to show, using real datasets, what information graph-
ical displays can reveal in data. Seeing graphics in action is the best way to learn
Graphical Data Analysis. Gaining experience in interpreting graphics and drawing
your own data displays is the most effective way forward.
The graphics shown in the book are a starting point. Sometimes more graph-
ics could have been drawn, and alternative graphics could always have been drawn.
Readers may have their own ideas of how best to present certain features of the
datasets. Although each graphic reveals information contained in its dataset, it is
likely that in every case there is more to be discovered. It is certainly one of the aims
of each analysis to find out as much as possible about the data. The graphics are not
drawn for their own sake, they are drawn to reveal and convey information.
A central idea underlying this book is that many graphics should be drawn. The
aim should not have to be to draw a single graphic that summarises everything that
can be said about the data. That is too difficult, if not impossible. The aim is to find
a number of graphics, maybe even a large number of them, where each contributes
something to the overall picture. Just as many photographs of the same object taken
from different angles in different lights make it easier for us to grasp a whole object,
datasets should be visualised in many different ways.
The emphasis is on exploring datasets first and on presenting results second.
Graphical Data Analysis is about using graphics to find results. One way to think
about this is to imagine you are looking at a new package in R and it uses a dataset
you are not familiar with for the examples in the help. What does the dataset look
like? How would you go about finding out what features it has, and how that might
affect the use of the methods in the package? What information can you find graphi-

xi
xii Graphical Data Analysis with R

cally in the data that a modelling approach should also find? What graphical displays
are there that help you understand the results of other people’s models, such as the
examples given on the help page? This presupposes an active interest on the part
of the reader. Roland Barthes, the French structuralist, referred to readerly texts and
writerly texts. In a writerly text the reader takes an active role in the construction of
meaning. I hope the readers of this book will take an active role in thinking about
what graphics show, what information can be gleaned from them, and why they were
chosen.
As every dataset used is available in R or one of its packages, information about
them can usually be found on the relevant help page, including which variables of
what types are involved and how big the dataset is. Ideally there should be a descrip-
tion of why and how it was collected, with references to original sources. Context is
important for interpreting results and you have to know your dataset and its prove-
nance. A well-developed sense of curiosity is very helpful in data analysis.
Graphical Data Analysis is an attractive way of working with data. It encourages
you to look at many different aspects and to investigate in many different directions.
You can be surprised by what you uncover and even by which graphic turns out to be
most effective in revealing information. Your results are easy to show to others and
are easy to discuss with others.
For any result found graphically, we should try to check what statistical sup-
port there is for it, just as we use graphics to review the results of our statistical
modelling. Graphical Data Analysis and more traditional statistical approaches com-
plement each other very well and we should take advantage of this.

Acknowledgements
No book on R should omit thanking Robert Gentleman, Ross Ihaka, and all the
many R contributors. They have made analysis of data much easier for the rest of
us. Thanks also to Hadley Wickham for all his R packages (sometimes referred to as
the Hadleyverse), especially for ggplot2, and to Yihui Xie for knitr, a major help in
keeping this book in order. Particular thanks are due to Bill Venables for his words
of wisdom and for R advice and code. If any of the book’s code looks elegant, then
it must be Bill’s, and if it looks clumsy, it is certainly mine.
Dennis Freuer, Urs Freund, Katrin Grimm, Harold Henderson, Ross Ihaka, Kary
Myers, Alexander Pilhöfer, Maryann Pirie, Friedrich Pukelsheim, Christina Sanchez,
Günther Sawitzki, Rolf Turner, Chris Wild, and Aisen Yang read one or more chap-
ters and made many helpful suggestions for improvement, some of which I have been
able to adopt. John Kimmel was an encouraging and efficient publisher, who organ-
ised several constructively critical reviewers, including Di Cook, Michael Friendly,
and Ramnath Vaidyanathan. I would also like to thank the Statistics Department at
the University of Auckland for a stimulating and sociable environment in which to
work on this book during my sabbatical.
Preface xiii

Finally I would like to thank my family for never asking me when the book would
be finished and for many other kindnesses.

Augsburg, December 2014 Antony Unwin

1
Setting the Scene

‘What is the use of a book’, thought Alice, without pictures or conversations?’

Lewis Carroll

1.1 Graphics in action

Female

0
Male

0
160 180 200 220
Speed (km/hr)

FIGURE 1.1: Histograms of speeds reached at the 2011 World Speed Skiing Champi-
onships. Source: www.fis-ski.com. There were more male competitors than females,
yet the fastest group of females were almost as fast as the fastest group of males. The
female competitors were all either fast or (relatively) slow—or were they?

1
2 Graphical Data Analysis with R

The code for producing Figure 1.1 is:

library(ggplot2); library(ggthemes)
data(SpeedSki, package = "GDAdata")
ggplot(SpeedSki, aes(x=Speed, fill=Sex)) + xlim(160, 220) +
geom_histogram(binwidth=2.5) + xlab("Speed (km/hr)") +
facet_wrap(~Sex, ncol=1) + ylab("") +
theme(legend.position="none")

The 2011 World Speed Skiing Championships were held at Verbier in Switzer-
land. Figure 1.1 shows histograms of the speeds reached by the 12 female and 79
male competitors. As well as emphasising that there were many more competitors in
the men’s competition than in the women’s, the plots show that the fastest person was
a man and that a woman was slowest. What is surprising (and more interesting) is
that the fastest women were almost as fast as the fastest men and that there were two
distinct groups of women, the fast ones and the slow ones. There also appear to be
two groups of men, although the gap between them is not so large. All of this infor-
mation is easy to see in the plots and would not be readily apparent from statistical
summaries of the data.
A little more investigation reveals the reason for the groupings: There are actu-
ally three different events, Speed One, Speed Downhill, and Speed Downhill Junior.
Figure 1.2 shows the histograms of speed by event and gender. We can see that Speed
One is the fastest event (competitors have special equipment), that no women took
part in the Downhill, and that there was little variation in speed amongst the Juniors.
The reason for the two female groups is now clear: They took part in two different
events. The distribution of the men’s speeds is affected by the inclusion of speeds for
the Downhill event and by the greater numbers of men who competed. It is interesting
that there is little variation in speed amongst the 7 women who competed in the Speed
One event, compared to that of the 39 men who took part. The women were faster
than most of the men.
The code for the plots takes a little getting used to. On the one hand the informa-
tion would still have been visible with less coding, although perhaps not so clearly.
Setting sensible scale limits, specifying meaningful binwidths, and aligning graphics
whose distributions you want to compare one above the other with the same size and
scales all help.
On the other hand, the plots might have benefitted from more coding to make
them look better: adding a title, choosing different colours, or specifying different
tick marks and labelling. That is more a matter of taste. This book is about data anal-
ysis, primarily exploratory analysis, rather than presentation, so the amount of coding
is reduced. Sometimes defaults are removed (like the legends) to reduce unnecessary
clutter.
The Speed Skiing example illustrates a number of issues that will recur through-
out the book. Graphics are effective ways of summarising and conveying informa-
tion. You need to think carefully about how to interpret a graphic. Context is im-
portant and you often have to gather additional background information. Drawing
several graphics is a lot better than just drawing one.
Setting the Scene 3

ggplot(SpeedSki, aes(Speed, fill=Sex)) +

geom_histogram(binwidth=2.5) + xlab("Speed (km/hr)") +
ylab("") + facet_grid(Sex~Event) +
theme(legend.position="none")

Speed Downhill Speed Downhill Junior Speed One

8

Female
4

0
8

Male
4

0
160 180 200 160 180 200 160 180 200
Speed (km/hr)

FIGURE 1.2: Histograms of speeds in the 2011 World Speed Skiing Championships
by event and gender. There was no Speed Downhill for women. The few women
taking part in the fastest event, Speed One, did very well, beating most of the men.

1.2 Introduction
There is no complex theory about graphics. In fact there is not much theory at all, and
so the topic is not covered in depth in books or lectures. Once the various graphics
forms have been described, the textbooks can pass on to supposedly more difficult
topics such as proving the central limit theorem or the asymptotic normality of max-
imum likelihood estimates.
The evidence of how graphics are used in practice suggests that they need more
attention than a cursory introduction backed up by a few examples. If we do not
have a theory which can be passed on to others about how to design and interpret
informative graphics, then we need to help them develop the necessary skills using a
range of instructive examples. It is surprising (and sometimes shocking) how casually
graphics may be employed, more as decoration than as information, more for reasons
of routine than for reasons of communication.
It is worthwhile, as always, to check what the justly famous John Tukey has to
say. In his paper [Tukey, 1993] he summarised what he described as the true purpose
of graphic display in four statements:

1. Graphics are for the qualitative/descriptive—conceivably the semiquantitative—

never for the carefully quantitative (tables do that better).
4 Graphical Data Analysis with R

2. Graphics are for comparison—comparison of one kind or another—not for ac-

cess to individual amounts.
3. Graphics are for impact—-interocular impact if possible, swinging-finger impact
if that is the best one can do, or impact for the unexpected as a minimum—-but
almost never for something that has to be worked at hard to be perceived.
4. Finally, graphics should report the results of careful data analysis—-rather than
be an attempt to replace it. (Exploration—to guide data analysis—-can make
essential interim use of graphics, but unless we are describing the exploration
process rather than its results, the final graphic should build on the data analysis
rather than the reverse.)
These are all excellent points, although the last one implies he is emphasising graph-
ics displays for presentation. It is notable that Tukey writes of ‘the final graphic’ as
if there might only be one. In practice he commonly used more than one.
Data analysis is a complex topic. Conclusions are seldom clear-cut, and there are
often several alternative competing explanations. Graphics are part of the data analy-
sis process; both the choice of graphics displays and how they are viewed can have an
important influence on any conclusions drawn. The subject matter of the study will
also affect how any graphics are interpreted. A positively correlated collection of
points in a scatterplot may be taken as evidence of a useful association (e.g., income
as a function of years of experience) or as evidence of insufficient agreement (e.g.,
where two methods of measuring the same quantity are compared). In the first case
an outlier may be unusual, but nevertheless perfectly plausible, while in the second
it may be a clear indication of a faulty measurement.
To appreciate how much can be revealed by even the simplest graphics, it is useful
to think of all the different forms a graphic might take and what they might tell you
about the data. Consider a barchart showing the frequencies of the three categories
of a variable:

• The bars could all be the same height (as you might expect in a scientific study
with three groups).

• The bars might have slightly different heights (possibly suggesting some missing
values in a scientific study).
• One of the bars might be very small, suggesting that that category is either rare
(a particular illness perhaps) or not particularly relevant (support for a minor
political party).
• The bars might not follow an anticipated pattern (sales in different regions or the
numbers of people with various qualifications applying for a job).
• ...

There is literally no limit to the number of possibilities once you take into account
the different settings the data may have come from. This means that you need to gain
Setting the Scene 5

experience in looking at graphics to learn to appreciate what they can and cannot
show.
As with all statistical investigations it is not only necessary to identify potential
conclusions, there has to be enough evidence to support the conclusions. Tradition-
ally this has meant carrying out statistical tests. Unfortunately there are distinct limits
to testing. A lot of insights cannot easily be directly tested (Does that outlying clus-
ter of points really form a distinctive group? Is that distribution bimodal?) and even
those that can be require restrictive assumptions for the tests to be valid. Additionally
there is the issue of multiple testing. None of this should inhibit us from testing when
we can, and occasionally a visually tentative result can be shown to have such a con-
vincingly small p-value that no amount of concerns about assumptions can cast much
doubt on the result. The interplay of graphics with testing and modelling is effective
because the two approaches complement each other so well. The only downside is
that while it is usually feasible to find a graphic which tells you something about the
results of a test, it is not always possible to find a test which can help you assess a
feature you have discovered in a graphic.

1.3 What is Graphical Data Analysis (GDA)?

It is simplest to see what GDA can do by looking at a few examples. These exam-
ples are all just initial looks at the datasets to give the flavour of GDA, not complete
analyses. In each case we will draw graphical displays of a dataset to reveal some
of the information in the data. Graphics are good for showing structure and for com-
municating results. They are generally easier to interpret than tables (which are good
for providing exact values) or statistical reports (which are good for giving estimates
and formal comparisons) and convey more qualitative information.
For each example more than one graphic has been drawn. In general it is always
better to draw many graphics, offering many different views, to ensure you get as
much information out of a dataset as you can. This is part of the open-ended nature
of GDA; it is a process, in which you pursue multiple ideas in parallel, just as any
investigative process should be. As a result, a graphical data analysis of these exam-
ples in practice would involve drawing a lot more graphics, checking to see if there
are other features of interest, comparing different versions of various graphics to see
which ones work best, and finally settling on a group of graphics to summarise the
analysis.
Drawing graphical displays of data is not about selecting the one best graphic,
it is about selecting the best set of graphics. In the past drawing graphics required
extensive effort and producing one graphic by hand took a lot of time, so it made
sense to draw only a few. Nowadays we can draw graphics very quickly, many of
the basic options are sensibly chosen by software defaults, and the overall quality
is extremely high. It is still a good idea to be selective about which graphics you
keep and especially about which graphics you show to others, but the main aim is
6 Graphical Data Analysis with R

to uncover information and there is every reason to draw more graphics rather than
fewer when doing GDA.
With presentation graphics you prepare one graphic for many potential viewers.
You need experience in deciding which graphic to present and expertise in how to
draw it well. With GDA you prepare many graphics for one viewer, yourself, and
your aim is to uncover the information hidden in the data. You need expertise in
choosing a set of informative graphics and experience in interpreting graphics.

The Iris dataset

The dataset contains information on three species of iris. There are 50 plants for
each species and measurements in cms for four attributes of each of the 150 plants.
Originally the dataset was used by Fisher to illustrate linear discriminant analysis
[Fisher, 1936]. (It has been used for all manner of other analyses since.) Figure 1.3
shows a default histogram of petal length, one of the four attributes. There appear to
be two clearly different groups in the dataset.

ggplot(iris, aes(Petal.Length)) + geom_histogram()

20
count

10

0
2 4 6
Petal.Length

FIGURE 1.3: A histogram of petal lengths from Fisher’s iris dataset. The data divide
into two distinct groups.

We can look at a plot of the two petal attributes together, petal length and petal
width. Figure 1.4 shows that there is a very strong relationship between these two
attributes, providing further convincing evidence of at least two distinct groups of
flowers. The colouring by species shows that the lower group are all setosa, that the
upper group is made up of both versicolor and virginica flowers, and that these two
groups are moderately well separated by their petal measurements.
The iris dataset is so well known that many readers will be familiar with this in-
formation. Imagine, however, that you wanted to present this information to someone
who did not already know it. Are there better ways than simple graphics?
Setting the Scene 7

library(ggthemes)
ggplot(iris, aes(Petal.Length, Petal.Width, color=Species)) +
geom_point() + theme(legend.position="bottom") +
scale_colour_colorblind()

2.5 ! !!

! !

!!!! ! ! ! !

! ! !

!!!! ! !

2.0 !!!! ! !

!! ! !

!! ! !! ! ! !

! !

! ! ! !

1.5
Petal.Width

! !!! !!!

! ! !!! !

! !!!!!!!

!! ! ! !

! !!

1.0 ! ! ! !!

0.5 !

! !!! !

!!! !

! !!!!!! !

! !!

0.0
2 4 6
Petal.Length

Species ! setosa ! versicolor ! virginica

FIGURE 1.4: A scatterplot of petal lengths and petal widths from Fisher’s iris dataset
with the flowers coloured by species. The two variables are highly correlated and
separate setosa clearly from the other two species. The colours used do not reflect
the real colours of the species, which are all fairly similar.
8 Graphical Data Analysis with R

Student Admissions at UC Berkeley dataset

The data concern applications to graduate school at Berkeley for the six largest de-
partments in 1973 classified by admission and sex. One of the reasons to study the
data was to see whether there was any gender bias in the admission of students.
Figure 1.5 shows separate barcharts for the three variables (department, gender, and
whether admitted or not).

library(gridExtra)
ucba <- as.data.frame(UCBAdmissions)
a <- ggplot(ucba, aes(Dept)) + geom_bar(aes(weight=Freq))
b <- ggplot(ucba, aes(Gender)) + geom_bar(aes(weight=Freq))
c <- ggplot(ucba, aes(Admit)) + geom_bar(aes(weight=Freq))
grid.arrange(a, b, c, nrow=1, widths=c(7,3,3))

750
2000 2000
count

count

count
500

1000 1000
250

0 0 0
A B C D E F Male Female AdmittedRejected
Dept Gender Admit

FIGURE 1.5: Numbers of applicants for Berkeley graduate programmes in 1973 for
the six biggest departments. The departments had different numbers of applicants.
Overall more males applied than females and fewer applicants were admitted than
rejected.

It is immediately apparent that different numbers applied to the departments,

ranging from about 600 to 900, that there were more male applicants than female
ones, and that more applicants were rejected than admitted. None of this is exactly
rocket science and all these comments could equally well have been derived from
summary statistics (with the additional benefit of knowing that the reported range of
departmental applicant numbers was actually from 584 to 933).
Graphics make these points directly and give an overview that is easier to remem-
ber than sets of numbers. Graphics are good for qualitative conclusions and often that
is what is primarily wanted. Of course, precise numbers may be useful as well, and
the two approaches complement one another.
The ordering of the departments is alphabetic, based on the coding used, and
other orderings may be more informative. The widths of the plots were controlled
to avoid wide bars, a common issue with default charts. The vertical scales might
also have been made equal for all three charts (they are close for the last two by
chance) to reflect that they display the same cases. Then the differences between the
departments would have been downplayed.
Setting the Scene 9

The main aim of the study was to examine the acceptance and rejection rates
by gender. For the six departments taken together the acceptance rate for females
was just over 30% and for males just under 45%, suggesting that there may have
been discrimination against females. Results by department are shown in Figure 1.6,
where the widths of the bars are proportional to the numbers in the respective groups..
In four of the six departments females had a higher rate of acceptance. This is an
example of Simpson’s paradox.

library(vcd)
ucb <- data.frame(UCBAdmissions)
ucb <- within(ucb, Accept <-
factor(Admit, levels=c("Rejected", "Admitted")))
doubledecker(xtabs(Freq~ Dept + Gender + Accept, data = ucb),
gp = gpar(fill = c("grey90", "steelblue")))

Accept

Rejected

Admitted
Male Fe Male F Male Female Male Female Ma Female Male Femal Gender
A B C D E F Dept

FIGURE 1.6: Acceptance rates at Berkeley by department and gender. Overall

males were more likely to be accepted, but four of the six departments were more
favourable to females. A doubledecker plot has been used to show the numbers of
each gender applying to the departments. Relatively fewer females applied to depart-
ments A and B, while relatively fewer males applied to departments C and E.
10 Graphical Data Analysis with R

Pima Indians diabetes dataset

This dataset has been used often in the machine learning literature and it can
be found on the web in the excellent UCI library of machine learning datasets
[Bache and Lichman, 2013]. The version from R used here, Pima.tr2 in the MASS
package, is a training dataset of size 300 with zero values recorded as NA’s (a stan-
dard missing value code). There are six continuous variables and default histograms
are shown for all of them in Figure 1.7.
The distributions of three variables (plasma glucose, blood pressure, and body
mass index) look roughly symmetric. The variable skin thickness has at least one
outlier and the diabetes pedigree function distribution is skew, possibly with outliers.
The age histogram shows that most women were young with an age distribution like
half of a classical age pyramid.

data(Pima.tr2, package="MASS")
h1 <- ggplot(Pima.tr2, aes(glu)) + geom_histogram()
h2 <- ggplot(Pima.tr2, aes(bp)) + geom_histogram()
h3 <- ggplot(Pima.tr2, aes(skin)) + geom_histogram()
h4 <- ggplot(Pima.tr2, aes(bmi)) + geom_histogram()
h5 <- ggplot(Pima.tr2, aes(ped)) + geom_histogram()
h6 <- ggplot(Pima.tr2, aes(age)) + geom_histogram()
grid.arrange(h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, nrow=2)

25
20
30 20

15
15
20
count

count

count

10
10
10
5 5

0 0 0
50 100 150 200 50 75 100 0 25 50 75 100
glu bp skin

25 50
60

20 40

15 40 30
count

count

count

10 20
20
5 10

0 0 0
20 30 40 50 0.0 0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0 2.5 20 40 60
bmi ped age

FIGURE 1.7: Histograms of the six continuous variables in Pima.tr2. There are a
few possible outlying values. Two of the variables have skew distributions.
Setting the Scene 11

Rather than drawing a lot of histograms to get an impression of the variables, it

takes up less space to draw boxplots. Since R automatically uses the same scale for
all boxplots in a window, they have to be standardised in some way first and this can
be achieved using the scale function. Figure 1.8 shows the result with the outliers
coloured in red for emphasis.

library(dplyr)
PimaV <- select(Pima.tr2, glu:age)
par(mar=c(3.1, 4.1, 1.1, 2.1))
boxplot(scale(PimaV), pch=16, outcol="red")

!
6

!
4

! !
! ! ! !
!
! ! !
! !
!
!
2
0
!2

glu bp skin bmi ped age

FIGURE 1.8: Scaled boxplots of the six continuous variables in a version of the Pima
Indians dataset in R. A couple of big outliers are picked out, as is a low outlier on bp
(blood pressure). The distributions of the last two variables, ped (diabetes pedigree)
and age, are skewed to the right.

There are several outliers (including a couple of extreme ones) and boxplots are
better for showing that than histograms. The last two variables are clearly not sym-
metric. Two facts should be borne in mind: The boxplots are not to be compared with
one another, drawing them all together in one plot is primarily a time and space sav-
ing exercise. The scaling just transforms each variable to have a mean of zero with a
standard deviation of one and nothing more, so the same points are identified as out-
liers as would be in the equivalent unscaled plots. This display tells us a little about
the shapes of the distributions, but not much, and nothing about the missing values
in the data, a potentially important feature. Of course, the histograms told us nothing
about the missing values either. Plots for missing values are discussed in §9.2.
The two sets of displays, histograms and boxplots, have given us a lot of infor-
mation about the variables in the dataset. A scatterplot matrix, as in Figure 1.9, tells
us even more.
12 Graphical Data Analysis with R

We can see that only two variables are strongly associated, bmi and skin, and
that that association would be even better were it not for the outlying skin thickness
measurement. All of this is valuable information, which helps us to understand the
kind of data we are dealing with.

library(GGally)
ggpairs(PimaV, diag=list(continuous=’density’),
axisLabels=’show’)

200

150 Corr: Corr: Corr: Corr: Corr:

glu

100
0.253 0.221 0.218 0.0919 0.284

!
!
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100 !
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50 100 150 20040 60 80 100 25 50 75 10020 30

glu bp skin bmi40 50 0.0 0.5 1.0
ped1.5 2.0 20 30 40 50 60 70
age

FIGURE 1.9: A scatterplot matrix of the six continuous variables for the same Pima
Indians dataset. Only one of the scatterplots shows a strong association (bmi and
skin). The two extreme outlying values, one skin and one ped measurement,
make it harder to see what is going on, as there is less space left for the bulk of the
data.
Setting the Scene 13

GDA in context
GDA does not stand on its own. As has already been said (and should probably
be repeated several times more), any result found graphically should be checked
with statistical methods, if at all possible. Graphics are commonly used to check
statistical results (residual plots being the classic example) and statistics should be
used to check graphical results. You might say that seeing is believing, but testing is
convincing.
Graphics are for revealing structure rather than details, for highlighting big dif-
ferences rather than identifying subtle distinctions. Edwards, Lindman and Savage
wrote of the interocular traumatic test; you know what the data mean when the con-
clusion hits you between the eyes [Edwards et al., 1963]. They were referring to sta-
tistical analyses in general, but it is particularly relevant for graphics. Their article
continued: “The interocular traumatic test is simple, commands general agreement,
and is often applicable; well-conducted experiments often come out that way. But the
enthusiast’s interocular trauma may be the skeptic’s random error. A little arithmetic
to verify the extent of the trauma can yield great peace of mind for little cost.”
Approximate figures suffice for appreciating structure, there is no need to provide
meticulous accuracy. If, however, exact values are needed—and they often are—then
tables are more useful. Graphics and tables should not be seen as competitors, they
complement one another. With printed reports sometimes difficult choices have to
be made about whether to include a graphic or a table. With electronic reports the
question becomes how to include both gracefully and effectively.
Graphical Data Analysis is obviously appropriate for observational data where
the standard statistical assumptions that are needed for model building may not hold.
It can also be valuable for analysing experimental data. There may be patterns by time
or other factors that were not expected. In medical studies, the balance of control and
treatment groups has to be checked.
This book concentrates on exploratory graphics, using graphics to explore
datasets to discover information. Experience gained in looking at and interpreting
exploratory graphics will be valuable for looking at all kinds of graphics associated
with statistics, including diagnostic graphics (for checking models) and presentation
graphics (for displaying results).
The importance of data analysis in general is sometimes underplayed, because
there is little formal theory and because the results that are found may appear obvi-
ous in retrospect. Effective graphical analysis makes things seem obvious, the effort
involved in making the graphical analysis effective is not so obvious. In his poem
“Adam’s Curse” W. B. Yeats wrote of the amount of work that went into getting a
line of poetry right:
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
That is an appropriate analogy here.
14 Graphical Data Analysis with R

1.4 Using this book, the R code in it, and the book’s webpage
A graphic is more than just a picture and every display in the book should convey
some information about the dataset it portrays. There should be some description of
what you can see accompanying every graphic. In order to ensure that all discussions
of graphics are either on the same page as the graphic itself or on the opposite page,
gaps have been left on some pages. This is intentional, as however irritating gaps may
be, it always seems more irritating having to turn pages backwards and forwards to
flip between displays and descriptions.
Like anything else, using graphics effectively is mostly a matter of practice. Study
and criticise the examples. Test out the code yourself—it is all available on the book’s
webpage, rosuda.org/GDA. You can experiment with it while you are reading
the book, just copy and paste the code into R. Vary the size and aspect ratio of
your graphics, vary the scaling and formatting, vary the colours used. Draw lots of
graphics, see what you get, and decide what is most effective for you in making it
easy to recognise information.
Work through the exercises at the ends of the chapters. All these exercises use
datasets available in R or in one of the packages associated with R. There are no
purely technical exercises, they all require consideration of the context involved. The
goal is not just to draw graphics successfully, but to interpret the resulting displays
and deduce information about the data. Some exercises are more open-ended than
others and you should not expect definitive answers to all of them. The best approach
is to try several versions of each graphic and to work with sets of graphics of different
types, not just with individual ones. Doing the exercises is highly recommended—
to become experienced in carrying out Graphical Data Analysis, you need to gain
experience in looking at graphics.
There are far too many R packages to load them all. It makes sense to ask read-
ers to load the packages that are used more often in the book instead of repeatedly
referring to them in the text. Please ensure you have the following packages loaded:
ggplot2 for graphics based on ideas from “The Grammar of Graphics”. Most of the
book’s graphics use these ideas.
gridExtra for arranging graphics drawn with ggplot2.
ggthemes for its colour blind palette.
dplyr for advanced and transparent data manipulation capabilities.
GGally for additional graphics in ggplot2 form, including parallel coordinate plots.
vcd for a range of graphics for categorical data.
extracat for multivariate categorical data graphics and for missing value patterns.
Some of these packages load further packages via a namespace. To check the state
of your R session you can use the function sessionInfo().
Setting the Scene 15

Loading packages in advance will mean that the functions in these packages can
be immediately used, and that any datasets supplied with the packages are to hand.
For datasets in other packages there are two cases to consider. With LazyData
packages datasets can be accessed without loading the package, as long as you have
the package installed. With (most) other installed packages a data statement is
needed, an R function for making a dataset available. To avoid repetition, datasets
are generally only loaded once in each chapter.
Many graphics are improved by an appropriate choice of window size, informa-
tive labelling, sensible scaling, good positioning (for instance in multiple graphics
displays) and other details, which are more about presentation than the graphic it-
self and may require much more code than you might expect. This book is about
exploratory graphics so the code is mainly restricted to the graphics essentials.
You may find some graphics too small (or too big). If so, redraw them yourself
and experiment to find what looks best to you. Space and design restrictions in a
printed book can hamper displays. For some of the graphics the code includes ad-
justments to improve the look of the default versions. Graphics for exploration are
usually only on display temporarily, while graphics for presentation, especially in
print, are more permanent. Nevertheless a little enhancing helps to avoid occasional
displeasing elements in exploratory graphics. It is often a matter of taste and you
should develop your own style of graphics for your own use. For presenting to others
you need to think of their needs and expectations as well. Some general advice on
coding graphics in R is given in Chapter 13.
Code listings for every plot are given in the book and on the book’s webpage for
downloading. The code is not explained in detail, so if an option choice puzzles you,
check the help file for the function, especially the examples there. With R there are
always several ways of achieving the same goal and you may find you would have
done things differently. The end result is the important thing.
Graphical functions in R can offer very many options and working out what ef-
fects they have, especially in combination, can be complicated. It would be nice to be
able to say that all functions follow the same rules with similarly defined parameters.
Languages are rarely consistent like that, and R is no exception.
No formal statistical analyses are carried out in this text, as there are already many
fine books covering statistical modelling. A list of suggested references is given at the
end of Chapter 2 and there are a few remarks at the end of each chapter. Readers are
encouraged to look for statistical methods to complement their graphical analyses.
You should be able to find the tools to do so in R and its many packages. There is
often a number of ways offered to carry out particular analyses, each with its own
advantages (and possibly disadvantages), so no recommendations are made here.
The final exercises in each chapter are labelled “Intermission” and are intended
to be a break and a distraction. Perhaps they would have been better labelled “And
now for something completely different”. At any rate, I hope they lead you to some
interesting visual discoveries and to developing your visual skills in many other di-
rections.
16 Graphical Data Analysis with R

Main points
1. Graphical Data Analysis uses graphics to display and interpret data to reveal the
information in a dataset. It is an exploratory tool rather than a confirmatory one.
2. Simple plots can reveal useful information about datasets.
Figure 1.1 showed a surprising feature of the Speed Skiiing Championships and
Figure 1.2 explained it. Figure 1.3 showed the two groups of flowers with quite
different petal lengths. Figure 1.5 showed that more males than females applied
to the Berkeley graduate program. Figure 1.8 showed that there are some extreme
outliers in the Pima Indians dataset.
3. Scales and formatting of plots are important.
Using the same scales for the two histograms in Figure 1.1 and aligning them
above one another is essential for conveying the information in the plots effec-
tively. Figure 1.3 is an informative histogram for the iris variable, as we can
see that there are two groups and the distributions of lengths within them. Bar-
charts with different numbers of categories, but from the same dataset, have dif-
ferent default scales and so care is necessary with interpretations across plots
(Figure 1.5). Comparing distribution forms for differently scaled variables needs
some standardisation first (Figure 1.8).
4. Different plots give different views of the data.
While Figure 1.3 displays the distribution of petal lengths in the iris dataset,
Figure 1.4 shows the close relationship between petal length and petal width.
Figure 1.7 shows the distribution shapes of the Pima Indian variables and Fig-
ure 1.8 emphasises outliers. Figure 1.9 shows that only two of the variables in
the dataset appear to be strongly related.
Setting the Scene 17

Exercises
More detailed information on the datasets is available on their help pages in R.
1. Iris
How would you describe this histogram of sepal width?

ggplot(iris, aes(Sepal.Width)) +
geom_histogram(binwidth=0.1)

2. Pima Indians
Summarise what this barchart shows:

ggplot(Pima.tr2, aes(type)) + geom_bar()

3. Pima Indians
Why is the upper left of this plot of numbers of pregnancies against age empty?

ggplot(Pima.tr2, aes(age,npreg)) + geom_point()

4. Estimating the speed of light

There are 100 estimates of the speed of light made by Michelson in 1879, com-
posed of 5 groups of 20 experiments each (dataset michelson in the MASS pack-
age).
(a) What plot would you draw for showing the distribution of all the values
together? What conclusions would you draw?
(b) What plots might be useful for comparing the estimates from the 5 different
experiments? Do the results from the 5 experiments look similar?

5. Titanic
The liner Titanic sank on its maiden voyage in 1912 with great loss of life. The
dataset is provided in R as a table. Convert this table into a data frame using
data.frame(Titanic).
(a) What plot would you draw for showing the distribution of all the values
together? What conclusions would you draw?
(b) Draw a graphic to show the number sailing in each class. What order of
variable categories did you choose and why? Are you surprised by the dif-
ferent class sizes?
(c) Draw graphics for the other three categorical variables. How good do you
think these data are? Why are there not more detailed data on the ages of
those sailing? Even if the age variable information (young and old) was
accurate, is this variable likely to be very useful in any modelling?
18 Graphical Data Analysis with R

6. Swiss
The dataset swiss contains a standardized fertility measure and various socio-
economic indicators for each of 47 French-speaking provinces of Switzerland in
about 1888.
(a) What plot would you draw for showing the distribution of all the values
together? What conclusions would you draw?
(b) Draw graphics for each variable. What can you conclude from the distribu-
tions concerning their form and possible outliers?
(c) Draw a scatterplot of Fertility against % Catholic. Which kind of
areas have the lowest fertility rates?
(d) What sort of relationship is there between the variables Education and
Agriculture?
7. Painters
The dataset painters in package MASS contains assessments of 54 classical
painters on four characteristics: composition, drawing, colour, and expression.
The scores are due to the eighteenth century art critic de Piles.
(a) What plot would you draw for showing the distribution of all the values
together? What conclusions would you draw?
(b) Draw a display to compare the distributions of the four assessments. Is it
necessary to scale the variables first? What information might you lose, if
you did? What comments would you make on the distributions individually
and as a set?
(c) What would you expect the association between the scores for drawing and
those for colour to be? Draw a scatterplot and discuss what the display
shows in relation to your expectations.

8. Old Faithful
The dataset faithful contains data on the time between eruptions and the duration
of the eruption for the Old Faithful geyser in Yellowstone National Park, USA.
(a) Draw histograms of the variable eruptions using the functions hist
and ggplot (from the package ggplot2). Which histogram do you prefer
and why? ggplot produces a warning, suggesting you choose your own
binwidth. What binwidth would you choose to convey all the information
you want to convey in a clear manner? Would a boxplot be a good alterna-
tive here?

(b) Draw a scatterplot of the two variables using either plot or ggplot. How
would you summarise the information in the plot?

9. Intermission
Van Dyck’s Charles I, King of England, from Three Angles belongs to the Royal
Collection in Windsor Castle. What is gained from having more than one view
of the King?