Witold Eryk Wolski <W.E.Wolski <at> ncl.ac.uk> writes: : : Dear Rgurus, : : To my knowledge the best way to visualize the distribution of a discrete : variable X is : plot(table(X)) : : The problem which I have is the following. I have to discrete variables : X and Y which distribution I would like to compare. To overlay the : distribution of Y with lines(table(Y)) gives not satisfying results. : This is the same in case of using density or histogram. : : Hence, I am wondering if there is a equivalent of the vioplot function : (package vioplot) for discrete variables : which starts with a boxplot and than adds a rotated plot(table()) plot : to each side of the box plot. : : Maybee I should ask it first: Does such a plot make any sense? If not : are there better solutions?
You could try a barplot or a balloonplot: tab <- table(stack(list(x1 = x1, x2 = x2))) # x1, x2 from Andy's post barplot(t(tab), beside = TRUE) library(gplots) balloonplot(tab) Although intended for comparing data to a theoretical distribution, rootogram can compare two discrete distributions: library(vcd) rootogram(tab[,1], tab[,2]) Another possibility is to fit each distribution to a parametric form using vcd::distplot as shown in the examples on its help page. ______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
