Hi Katherine, If you have the original data, you can use the function barplot.CI from the package sciplot which will calculate the means and CI's for you. Examples are at: http://mutualism.williams.edu/sciplot
If you have the means and CI's already calculated, the following function will do what you want: CI.plot <- function(mean, std, ylim=c(0, max(CI.H)), ...) { CI.H <- mean+1.96*std # Calculate upper CI CI.L <- mean-1.96*std # Calculate lower CI xvals <- barplot(mean, ylim=ylim, ...) # Plot bars arrows(xvals, mean, xvals, CI.H, angle=90) # Draw error bars arrows(xvals, mean, xvals, CI.L, angle=90) } On Mon, 2007-10-22 at 17:03 -0400, Katherine Jones wrote: > Apologies if this has been asked before. I am having trouble > understanding the R mailing list never mind R! > > I am relatively new to R having migrated from Minitab nd SPSS. I > have managed to do some more complicated statistics such as > hierarchical partitioning of variance on an 80,000 record dataset but > have to admit that drawing a simple bar plot I could do by hand is > proving extremely difficult! > > I have Crawley's 'The R book' which is proving a big help, but still > does not provide me with all of the information I need. > > What I want to do:- > I have a small dataset, with 'rate' as the dependent variable (y axis > variable) and two groups ('cat' and 'box') which I have calculated > the mean and standard error for and would like to display as a bar > plot. I would like to display the standard error for each group NOT a > pooled standard error (i.e. error bars will be different heights on > the two bars). In the Crawley book, he just repeats the same error > bars across all groups, and I don't know how to specify the different > error for each bar. > > What I have managed to do so far:- > -calculate mean and standard error > -plots means with confidence intervals > -plot means as bar plot but with no error bars or confidence intervals > -everything except what I want to do! > > I have learnt a lot about R but it is getting rather frustrating that > I can do complex GLMs but cannot do a simple plot in 4 hours! I have > migrated to R because I like the way it can do almost anything and > because I'm trying to go almost completely freeware as everytime I > move institution I run into trouble with getting software licenses > which also tend to be expensive. However, I'm not the most computer > literate person and have grown up with 'menus' and 'windows'. > > Any help much appreciated as it will save me much time and frustration! > > Dr. Katherine Jones > Department of Biology, > Carleton University > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. -- http://mutualism.williams.edu ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.