On Dec 18, 2010, at 7:01 AM, e-letter wrote:
Readers,
I am trying to use the function dotchart. The data is:
testdot
category values1 values2 values3 values4
1 a 10 27 56 709
2 b 4 46 47 208
3 c 5 17 18 109
4 d 6 50 49 308
The following error occurs
dotchart(testdot,groups=testdot[,2])
Error in dotchart(testdot, labels = testdot[, 1], groups = testdot[,
2]) :
'x' must be a numeric vector or matrix
According to my understanding (clearly wrong!) of the documentation
for dotchart (accessed from the manual in section 'graphics'), columns
of data can be selected by 'groups' for subsequent plotting.
The misunderstanding is in how you see the grouping information versus
how R expects it. R generally expects such data in what is called
"long" format, i.e. there will be one values columns and a category
column. There are various ways to change the arrangement of your data.
The function stack(), the function reshape(), or probably most
commonly the function melt from reshape2 being the typical chosen
routes.
The
objective is to be able to create a dot chart where each row is
labelled according to the row names in the 'category' column and two
columns can be selected, e.g. 'values1' and 'values2'. Then I tried:
testdot1<-testdot[,1]
testdot2<-testdot[,2]
testdot3<-testdot[,3]
dotchart(c(testdot2,testdot3),labels=testdot1)
See if this is more to your liking:
require(reshape) # I'm not sure why I have reshape_0.8.3 rather than
reshape2 loaded
# I'm pretty sure Hadley would prefer that people
use pkg:reshape2
mdot <- melt(dot)
dotchart(mdot$value, groups=mdot$category, labels=mdot$variable)
# OR more readable
with(mdot, dotchart(value, groups=category, labels=variable) )
I'm not sure I got the roles of "values" and "category" correct, but
it should be a simple matter to switch them in the dotcghart call if
that is your pleasuRe.
A graph is produced, but not as expected. Instead of 4 rows labelled
(descending order from top row) a,b,c,d, and each row containing two
data points, the graph shows 8 rows (?) with the top 4 rows
un-labelled and the bottom 4 rows labelled (descending order) d,c,b,a
and each row shows only 1 datum point.
How do I specify the order of labelling of the rows?
How do I write correct commands to obtain a dot chart with 4 rows,
each row containing the two (or if required three) data points?
David Winsemius, MD
West Hartford, CT
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