1001 Graphics

Abstract

Statistical graphics, or in more modern terms, data visualization, is not a new discipline. Whereas in the early days the construction of a graph was technically not easy and usually even required some artistic capabilities, generating statistical graphs is very easy in today’s statistical software packages. This obviously leads to a less careful construction of these plots. In an object oriented software package like R we can call the generic function plot with almost any arbitrary object as argument, and some plot method will render this object, whether it makes sense or not.

This paper investigates how well chosen plot defaults and rendering techniques can guarantee much better results in a graphical data analysis. Furthermore, standard plots and examples of plot ensembles are presented which are suitable for analyzing variables of a specific structure.