Togaware DATA MINING
Desktop Survival Guide
by Graham Williams
Google


Scatterplot

A http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/scatterplotscatterplot presents points in 2-dimensional space corresponding to a pair of chosen variables. R's plot function defaults to a scatterplot. Relationships between pairs of variables can be seen through the use of a scatterplot and clusters and outliers can begin to be identified.

Using the wine dataset a plot is created to display http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhenolsPhenols versus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlavanoidsFlavanoids. To add a little more interest to the plot, a different symbol (and for colour devices, a different colour) is used to display the three different values of Type for each point. The symbols are set using Type as the argument to pch, but after converting it to integers with as.integer. In a similar fashion, the colours are chosen to replace numbers in a transformation of the Type vector by indexing into the output of palette, achieved using lapply, and turning the result into a flat list, rather than a list of lists, using unlist.

We can start to understand that there is somewhat of a linear relationship between these two variables, and even more interesting is the clustering of Types.

[width=0.75]rplot-wine-scatter



iType <- as.integer(wine$Type)
colours <- unlist(lapply(iType, function(x){palette()[x+1]}))
plot(wine$Phenols, wine$Flavanoids, col=colours, pch=iType)
dev.off()

http://rattle.togaware.com/code/rplot-wine-scatter.R

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