Department of Biostatistics Seminar/Workshop Series presents:
A Grammar of Graphics: past, present, and future
Hadley Wickham
Iowa State University
January 9, 2008, 1:30-2:30 pm, MRBIII 1220
The grammar of graphics can describe any static graphic in terms of a series of orthogonal components. In this talk I will motivate the grammar, describe my research on the grammar, how it fits into my broader research agenda, and then talk about some of the practical considerations of using ggplot, my implementation of the grammar in R.
To give you a feel for the types of plot that the grammar enables, I'll show examples of multivariate spatio-temporal plots from a recent paper, focusing on how the notion of independent layers facilitates the development of complex graphics. Then, using the grammar, I'll look at how we can develop new graphical methods that work hand-in-hand with numerical techniques to improve our understanding of data. In particular, I'll illustrate how we can iterate between graphics and models to build up a better understanding of our data than we could with just models, or just graphics. To finish up, I'll discuss one issue that the grammar doesn't shed any light on: what you should be plotting.