[Rd] Suggestion: barplot function

[Robert Baer]

On 1/27/2017 8:30 AM, danielrenato at lycos.com wrote:
> Hello developers folks!
>
> First, congratulations for the wonderful work with R.
>
> For science, barplots with error bars are very important. We were 
> wondering that is so easy to use the boxplot function:
>
> boxplot(Spores~treatment, col=treatment_colors)
>
> But there is no such function for barplots with standard deviation or 
> standard error. It becomes a "journey" to plot a simple graph (e.g. 
> https://www.r-bloggers.com/building-barplots-with-error-bars/).
>
> The same way that is easy to use the boxplot function, do you think it 
> is possible to upgrade the barplot function: i.e.: 
> barplot(Spores~treatment, error.bar=standard_error, col=treatment_colors)
Marc may not speak for R Core, but he certainly has summarized what has 
been an apparent consensus attitude to barplot() and confidence bars in 
this community over the last decade.  Further, he is probably right 
about no changes after this many years.

I might mention that if you want a close cousin to barplot() that does 
what you want with base graphics (from the drawing mechanics point of 
view) see the barplot2() function in the gplots package. You provide 
your own bar lengths.  Regardless of their merits, barplots are a common 
graphing mechanism used by my scientific colleagues to convey their 
data, and I don't see that changing any time soon.  The one thing that 
is even less forgivable than dynamite plots is bars with no dispersion 
indication at all. Too bad barplot2() isn't the default.




>
> Thank you so much!
> Daniel, FU-Berlin
>
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-- 


--
Robert W. Baer, Ph.D.
Professor of Physiology
Kirksville College of Osteopathic Medicine
A T Still University of Health Sciences
800 W. Jefferson St
Kirksville, MO 63501
660-626-2321 Department
660-626-2965 FAX