R: Data Analysis and Visualization

Using jitter to distinguish closely packed data points

Sometimes, when working with large datasets, we might find that a lot of data points on a scatter plot overlap each other. In this recipe, we will learn how to distinguish between closely packed data points by adding a small amount of noise with the jitter() function.

Getting ready

All you need for the next recipe is to type it in the R prompt as we will use some base library functions to define a new error bar function. You can also save the recipe code as a script so that you can use it again later on.

How to do it...

First, let's create a graph that has a lot of overlapping points:

x <- rbinom(1000, 10, 0.25)
y <- rbinom(1000, 10, 0.25)
plot(x,y)

Now, let's add some noise to the data points to ...