R in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

An Overview of R Graphics

R includes tools for drawing most common types of charts, including bar charts, pie charts, line charts, and scatter plots. Additionally, R can also draw some less-familiar charts like quantile-quantile (Q-Q) plots, mosaic plots, and contour plots. The following table shows many of the charts included in the graphics package.

Graphics package function	Description
barplot	Bar and column charts
dotchart	Cleveland dot plots
hist	Histograms
density	Kernel density plots
stripchart	Strip charts
qqnorm (in stats package)	Quantile-quantile plots
xplot	Scatter plots
smoothScatter	Smooth scatter plots
qqplot (in stats package)	Quantile-quantile plots
pairs	Scatter plot matrices
image	Image plots
contour	Contour plots
persp	Perspective charts of three-dimensional data
interaction.plot	Summary of the response for two-way combinations of factors
sunflowerplot	Sunflower plots

You can show R graphics on the screen or save them in many different formats. Graphics Devices explains how to choose output methods. R gives you an enormous amount of control over graphics. You can control almost every aspect of a chart. Customizing Charts explains how to tweak the output of R to look the way you want. This section shows how to use many common types of R charts.

Scatter Plots

To show how to use scatter plots, we will look at cases of cancer in 2008 and toxic waste releases by state in 2006. Data on new cancer cases (and deaths from cancer) are tabulated by the American Cancer Society; information on toxic chemicals ...