[R] Can 'mosaic' be used with a continuous variable?

[Michael Friendly]

Hi Mauricio

On 9/14/2011 2:10 PM, Mauricio Cornejo wrote:
> Thanks Z.
>
> Let me clarify my problem a bit further ... as I don't think I could use cut() or spine() to solve it.
>
> I have a data frame with three columns (A, B, Value).  'A' and 'B' are categorical and 'Value' is continuous and non-negative.  I'm looking to make a mosaic plot with A on one axis and B on the other.  The size (i.e. area) of the tiles would correspond to the proportion of the total Value represented by the given combinations of the levels of A and B.
>
> Thanks again,
> Mauricio
>
I think what you are looking for is called a TreeMap -- a plot of a 
single continuous variable broken down by two or more categorical 
variables (which need not be crossed, as in a contingency table).
Typically, the Value is shown as the size (area) of the tile for each
leaf of the tree.

See:
http://flowingdata.com/2010/02/11/an-easy-way-to-make-a-treemap/

for some simple examples in R

>
> ________________________________
> From: Achim Zeileis<Achim.Zeileis at uibk.ac.at>
>
> Cc: "r-help at r-project.org"<r-help at r-project.org>
> Sent: Wednesday, September 14, 2011 1:45 PM
> Subject: Re: [R] Can 'mosaic' be used with a continuous variable?
>
> On Wed, 14 Sep 2011, Mauricio Cornejo wrote:
>
>> Hello,
>>
>> I'm wondering if the 'mosaic' plot of the vcd package (or any other function for that matter) can be used with a continuous variable that should be represented via various categorical variables.? All the documentation I've read lead me to believe that it only works with counts of categories.
>>
>> Alternatively, I've thought of first creating a contingency table where the frequencies would really be the values of my continuous variable as opposed to counts ... but I don't know how to do that.
>
> Well, you can always use cut() to create a categorical variable from a continuous variable. But you have to do that in advance before calling mosaic().
>
> For a bivariate display with a continuous x and a categorical y, you can use spine() which does the categorization for you.
>
> hth,
> Z
>
>> Any insight would be appreciated.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Mauricio
>>
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>
>


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Michael Friendly     Email: friendly AT yorku DOT ca
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