[R] log y 'axis' of histogram

Hadley Wickham hadley at rice.edu
Mon Aug 30 15:40:23 CEST 2010


> I have counts ranging over 4-6 orders of magnitude with peaks
> occurring at various 'magic' values.  Using a log scale for the
> y-axis enables the smaller peaks, which would otherwise
> be almost invisible bumps along the x-axis, to be seen

That doesn't justify the use of a _histogram_  - and regardless of
what distributional display you use, logging the counts imposes some
pretty heavy restrictions on the shape of the distribution (e.g. that
it must not drop to zero).

It may be useful for your purposes, but that doesn't necessarily make
it a meaningful graphic.

Hadley

-- 
Assistant Professor / Dobelman Family Junior Chair
Department of Statistics / Rice University
http://had.co.nz/



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