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
______________________________________________
R-help@r-project.org 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.