An Introduction to the Lattice Package

Abstract

Rcontains many functions that can be used to draw graphs for specific types of data.Many of these plotting functions are not available in the packages that are loaded by default when R is started. Some are as simple to use as the plot function; others require more effort. The lattice package allows R to reach its full potential for imaging higher-dimensional data. We used one type of lattice plot, the multipanel scatterplot, in Section 1.4.1 to plot density of deep-sea pelagic bioluminescent organisms versus depth. The lattice package was written by Deepayan Sarkar, who recently published an excellent book which we highly recommend (Sarkar, 2008). The package implements the Trellis Graphics framework developed at Bell Labs in the early 1990s. In Chapter 7 we introduced the coplot function, which is particularly useful for displaying subsets of data in separate panels, when there is a grouping structure to the data. The lattice package allows taking this feature much further, but it comes at the price of more programming effort. However, by now you should have gained enough proficiency to master the function without too much difficulty. 8.1