Graphing Tools

Abstract

Chapter 5, the plot function was introduced. We demonstrated elementary scatterplots, modifying plotting characters, and adding x- and y-labels and a main title. In this chapter, we introduce more graphing tools. Not all of them are among our favourites. For example, we have never used pie charts or bar charts. However, these graphs seem to be on the shortlist of so many scientists that we find it necessary to include them in this book. They are discussed in Sections 7.1 and 7.2. Tools to detect outliers—the boxplot and Cleveland dotplot—are presented in Sections 7.3 and 7.4, respectively. We also demon- strate graphs illustrating the mean with lines added to represent the standard error. Scatterplots are further discussed in Section 7.5. Multipanel scatterplots are discussed in Sections 7.6 and 7.7, and advanced tools to display multiple graphs in a single window are presented in Section 7.8.