Hi Steven, This is not, strictly speaking, the answer to your question (hopefully Tom already answered that). Rather, it is the answer to questions you *might* have asked (and perhaps one of them will be one you wished you had asked).
Barplots have a low data:ink ratio...you are using an entire plot to convey 8 means. A variety of alternatives exist. As a minimal first step, you could just use points to show the means and skip all the wasted bar space, and you might add error bars in (A). You could also use boxplots to give your viewers (or just yourself) a sense of the distribution along with the medians (B). Another elegant option is violin plots. These are kind of like (exactly like?) mirrored density plots. A measure of central tendency is not explicitly shown, but the *entire* distribution and range is shown (C). Cheers, Josh (P.S. I hit send too soon before and sent you an offlist message with PDF examples) ## Create your data DF <- data.frame( Incidents = factor(rep(c("a", "b", "d", "e"), each = 25)), Months = factor(rep(1:2, each = 10)), Time = rnorm(100)) ## Load required packages require(ggplot2) require(Hmisc) ## Option A ggplot(DF, aes(x = Incidents, y = Time, colour = Months)) + stat_summary(fun.y = "mean", geom = "point", position = position_dodge(width = .90), size = 3) + stat_summary(fun.data = "mean_cl_normal", geom = "errorbar", position = "dodge") ## Option B ggplot(DF, aes(x = Incidents, y = Time, fill = Months)) + geom_boxplot(position = position_dodge(width = .8)) ## Option C ggplot(DF, aes(x = Time, fill = Months)) + geom_ribbon(aes(ymax = ..density.., ymin = -..density..), alpha = .2, stat = "density") + facet_grid( ~ Incidents) + coord_flip() ## Option C altered ggplot(DF, aes(x = Time, fill = Months)) + geom_ribbon(aes(ymax = ..density.., ymin = -..density..), alpha = .2, stat = "density") + facet_grid( ~ Incidents + Months) + scale_y_continuous(name = "density", breaks = NA, labels = NA) + coord_flip() On Fri, May 27, 2011 at 3:08 PM, steven mosher <mosherste...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi, > > I'm really struggling with barplot > > I have a data.frame with 3 columns. The first column represents an > "incident" type > The second column represents a "month" > The third column represents a "time" > > Code for a sample data.frame > > incidents <- rep(c('a','b','d','e'), each =25) > months <- rep(c(1,2), each =10) > times <-rnorm(100) > > # make my sample data > > DF <- > data.frame(Incidents=as.factor(incidents),Months=as.factor(months),Time=times) > > # now calculate a mean for the "by" groups of incident type and month > > pivot <- > aggregate(DF$Time,by=list(Incidents=DF$Incidents,Months=DF$Month),FUN=mean,simplify=TRUE) > > What I want to create is a bar plot where I have groupings by incident type > ( a,b,d,e) and within each group > I have the months in order. > > So group 1 would be Type "a"; month 1,2; > group 2 would be Type "b"; month 1,2; > group 3 would be Type "d"; month 1,2; > group 4 would be Type "3"; month 1,2; > > I know barplot is probably the right function but I'm a bit lost on how to > specify groupings etc > > TIA > > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] > > ______________________________________________ > 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. > -- Joshua Wiley Ph.D. Student, Health Psychology University of California, Los Angeles http://www.joshuawiley.com/ ______________________________________________ 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.