[R] Drawing rectangles in multiple panels

[hadley wickham]

On 7/12/07, Deepayan Sarkar <deepayan.sarkar at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 7/11/07, hadley wickham <h.wickham at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > A question/comment: I have usually found that the subscripts argument is
> > > what I need when passing *external* information into the panel function, for
> > > example, when I wish to add results from a fit done external to the trellis
> > > call. Fits[subscripts] gives me the fits (or whatever) I want to plot for
> > > each panel. It is not clear to me how the panel layout information from
> > > panel.number(), etc. would be helpful here instead. Am I correct? -- or is
> > > there a smarter way to do this that I've missed?
> >
> > This is one of things that I think ggplot does better - it's much
> > easier to plot multiple data sources.  I don't have many examples of
> > this yet, but the final example on
> > http://had.co.nz/ggplot2/geom_abline.html illustrates the basic idea.
>
> That's probably true. The Trellis approach is to define a plot by
> "data source" + "type of plot", whereas the ggplot approach (if I
> understand correctly) is to create a specification for the display
> (incrementally?) and then render it. Since the specification can be
> very general, the approach is very flexible. The downside is that you
> need to learn the language.

Yes, that's right.  ggplot basically decomposes "type of plot" into
statistical transformation (stat) + geometric object and allows you to
control each component separately.  ggplot also explicitly includes
the idea of layers (ie. one layer is a scatterplot and another layer
is a loess smooth) and allows you to supply different datasets to
different layers.

> On a philosophical note, I think the apparent limitations of Trellis
> in some (not all) cases is just due to the artificial importance given
> to data frames as the one true container for data. Now that we have
> proper multiple dispatch in S4, we can write methods that behave like
> traditional Trellis calls but work with more complex data structures.
> We have tried this in one bioconductor package (flowViz) with
> encouraging results.

That's one area which I haven't thought much about.  ggplot is very
data.frame centric and it's not yet clear to me how plotting a linear
model (say) would fit into the grammar.

Hadley