R: Lattice Graphics

Lattice {lattice} | R Documentation

## Lattice Graphics

### Description

Implementation of Trellis Graphics in R

### Details

Trellis Graphics is a framework for data visualization developed at the Bell Labs by Rick Becker, Bill Cleveland et al, extending ideas presented in Bill Cleveland's 1993 book Visualizing Data.

Lattice is best thought of as an implementation of Trellis Graphics for R. It is built upon the Grid graphics engine and requires the `grid` add-on package. It is not (readily) compatible with traditional R graphics tools. The public interface is based on the implementation in S-PLUS, but features several extensions, in addition to incompatibilities introduced through the use of `grid`. To the extent possible, care has been taken to ensure that existing Trellis code written for S-PLUS works unchanged (or with minimal change) in Lattice. If you are having problems porting S-PLUS code, read the entry for `panel` in the documentation for `xyplot`. Most high level Trellis functions in S-PLUS are implemented, with the exception of `piechart`.

Type `help(package = lattice)` to see a list of (public) Lattice graphics functions for which further documentation is available. The ‘See Also’ section below has list of specific areas of possible interest and pointers to the help pages with respective details. Apart from the documentation accompanying this package, several documents outlining the use of Trellis graphics are available from Bell Lab's website; these might provide a holistic introduction to the Trellis paradigm. A book on lattice is also available as part of Springer's ‘Use R’ series.

The example section below shows how to bring up a brief history of changes to the lattice package, which provides a summary of new features.

### Note

High level Lattice functions (like `xyplot`) are different from conventional R graphics functions because they don't actually draw anything. Instead, they return an object of class `"trellis"` which has to be then `print`ed or `plot`ted to create the actual plot. This is normally done automatically, but not when the high level functions are called inside another function (most often `source`) or other contexts where automatic printing is suppressed (e.g. `for` or `while` loops). In such situations, an explicit call to `print` or `plot` is required.

Lattice plots are highly customizable via user-modifiable settings. However, these are completely unrelated to base graphics settings; in particular, changing `par()` settings usually have no effect on lattice plots.

### Author(s)

Deepayan Sarkar Deepayan.Sarkar@R-project.org

### References

Sarkar, Deepayan (2008) “Lattice: Multivariate Data Visualization with R”, Springer. ISBN: 978-0-387-75968-5 http://lmdvr.r-forge.r-project.org/

Bell Lab's Trellis Page: http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/departments/sia/project/trellis/

Cleveland, W.S. (1993) Visualizing Data.

Becker, R.A., Cleveland, W.S. and Shyu, M. “The Visual Design and Control of Trellis Display”, Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics

### See Also

The Lattice user interface primarily consists of several ‘high level’ generic functions (listed below), each designed to create a particular type of statistical display by default. While each function does different things, they share several common features, reflected in several common arguments that affect the resulting displays in similar ways. These arguments are extensively (sometimes only) documented in the help page for `xyplot`. This includes a discussion of conditioning and control of the Trellis layout.

Lattice employs an extensive system of user-controllable parameters to determine the look and feel of the displays it produces. To learn how to use and customise the Graphical parameters used by the Lattice functions, see `trellis.par.set`. For other settings, see `lattice.options`. The default graphical settings are different for different graphical devices. To learn how to initialise new devices with the desired settings or change the settings of the current device, see `trellis.device`.

To learn about sophisticated (non-default) printing capabilities, see `print.trellis`. See `update.trellis` to learn about manipulating a `"trellis"` object. Tools to augment lattice plots after they are drawn (including `locator`-like functionality) is described in the `trellis.focus` help page.

The following is a list of ‘high level’ functions in the Lattice package with a brief description of what they do. In all cases, the actual display is produced by the so-called `panel` function, which has a suitable default, but can be substituted by an user defined function to create custom displays. The user will most often be interested in the default panel functions, which have a separate help page, linked to from the help pages of the corresponding high level function. Although documented separately, arguments to these panel functions can be supplied directly to the high level functions, which will forward the arguments as appropriate.

Univariate:

`barchart` bar plots

`bwplot` box and whisker plots

`densityplot` kernel density plots

`dotplot` dot plots

`histogram` histograms

`qqmath` quantile plots against mathematical distributions

`stripplot` 1-dimensional scatterplot

Bivariate:

`qq` q-q plot for comparing two distributions

`xyplot` scatter plot (and possibly a lot more)

Trivariate:

`levelplot` level plots (similar to image plots in R)

`contourplot` contour plots

`cloud` 3-D scatter plots

`wireframe` 3-D surfaces (similar to persp plots in R)

Hypervariate:

`splom` scatterplot matrix

`parallel` parallel coordinate plots

Miscellaneous:

`rfs` residual and fitted value plot (also see `oneway`)

`tmd` Tukey Mean-Difference plot

Additionally, there are several panel functions that do little by themselves, but can be useful components of custom panel functions. These are documented in `panel.functions`. Lattice also has a collection of convenience functions that correspond to the base graphics primitives `lines`, `points`, etc. They are implemented using Grid graphics, but try to be as close to the base versions as possible in terms of their argument list. These functions have imaginative names like `llines` or `panel.lines` and are often useful when writing (or porting from S-PLUS code) nontrivial panel functions.

### Examples

    ## Not run:
    RShowDoc("NEWS", package = "lattice")
    ## End(Not run)

[Package lattice version 0.17-17 Index]