[R] Drawing rectangles in multiple panels

[Stephen Tucker]

I wonder what kind of objects? Are there large advantages for allowing
lattice functions to operate on objects other than data frames - I
couldn't find any screenshots of flowViz but I imagine those objects
would probably be list of arrays and such? I tend to think of mapply()
[and more recently melt()], etc. could always be applied beforehand,
but I suppose that would undermine the case for having generic
functions to support the rich collection of object classes in R...


--- 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.
> 
> 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.
> 
> -Deepayan
> 
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch 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.
>