[R] Question of programming style

[Uwe Ligges]

s-luppescu at uchicago.edu wrote:
> 
> This is really a question of how to program this *BETTER*. It works as I have
> done it, but is quite ugly.
> 
> I want to do a 3d scatterplot of the upper triangle of a matrix, where the
> z-values are the values in the matrix, and the row and column indices are the y-
> and x-values. The complete (11 by 11) matrix is mmtop94.2. Here is my awkward
> code:
> 
> mmtop94.2[lower.tri(mmtop94.2)] <- NA
> 
> # Here i is the row (y variable), j is the column (x var)
> plotdata <- matrix(0, ncol=3, nrow=121)
> for (i in 1:11)
>   {
>     for (j  in 1:11)
>       {
>         k <- (i-1) * 11 + j
>         plotdata[k,] <- c(j, abs(i - 12), mmtop94.2[i, j])
>       }
>   }
> plotdata2 <- na.omit(plotdata)
> 
> scatterplot3d(plotdata2, type='h')

You only need to specify the points to be plotted:


 ## upper triangle of the correct size:
 temp <- upper.tri(mmtop94.2, diag = TRUE) 
 z <- mmtop94.2[temp]  # values
 y <- nrow(mmtop94.2) + 1 - row(mmtop94.2)[temp]  # row indices
 x <- col(mmtop94.2)[temp]  # col indices
 scatterplot3d(x, y, z, type="h") 



> It seems to me that I should not have to initialize the plotdata matrix. And
> are all those for loops really necessary?

Right. You'll need a "plotdata matrix" only for surface plots (e.g.
persp(.)). 
scatterplot3d(.) is designed to plot 3D point clouds.


Regards,
Uwe Ligges
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