Hadley,

It's not just that counts might be zero, but also that the base of
each bar starts at zero. I really don't see how logging the y/axis of
a histogram makes sense.

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

The references given for logHist in David Scott's DistributionUtils
package are:

Barndorff-Nielsen, O. (1977) Exponentially decreasing distributions for the logarithm of particle size, Proc. Roy. Soc. Lond., A353, 401–419.

Barndorff-Nielsen, O. and Blæsild, P (1983). Hyperbolic distributions. In Encyclopedia of Statistical Sciences, eds., Johnson, N. L., Kotz, S. and Read, C. B., Vol. 3, pp. 700–707. New York: Wiley.

Fieller, N. J., Flenley, E. C. and Olbricht, W. (1992) Statistics of particle size data. Appl. Statist., 41, 127–146.


Hadley

On Sunday, August 29, 2010, Joshua Wiley<jwiley.ps...@gmail.com>  wrote:
Hi Derek,

Here is an option using the package ggplot2:

library(ggplot2)
x<- sample(x = 10:50, size = 50, replace = TRUE)
qplot(x = x, geom = "histogram") + scale_y_log()

However, the log scale is often inappropriate for histograms, because
the y-axis represents counts, which could potentially be 0, and
therefore undefined (R outputs -Inf).  Another option using base
graphics would be something along the lines (no pun intended) of:

temp<- hist(x, plot = FALSE) #get histogram data
plot(x = temp$mids, y = log(temp$counts), type = "h")

HTH,

Josh

On Sun, Aug 29, 2010 at 6:58 PM, Derek M Jones<de...@knosof.co.uk>  wrote:
All,

I have been trying to get calls to hist(...) to be plotted
with the y-axis having a log scale.

I have tried: par(ylog=TRUE)

I have also looked at the histogram package.

Suggestions welcome.

--
Derek M. Jones                         tel: +44 (0) 1252 520 667
Knowledge Software Ltd                 mailto:de...@knosof.co.uk
Source code analysis                   http://www.knosof.co.uk

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--
Joshua Wiley
Ph.D. Student, Health Psychology
University of California, Los Angeles
http://www.joshuawiley.com/

______________________________________________
R-help@r-project.org mailing list
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PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.



--
Derek M. Jones                         tel: +44 (0) 1252 520 667
Knowledge Software Ltd                 mailto:de...@knosof.co.uk
Source code analysis                   http://www.knosof.co.uk

______________________________________________
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and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.

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