[R] bubble plot problems

[Anupam Tyagi]

Pieter Provoost <pieterprovoost <at> gmail.com> writes:

> I'm having some problems with a bubble plot (ps package). I don't want 
> tick marks on all four sides (just two), I want to have a smaller font 
> size, and I would like to be able to define bubble sizes shown in the 
> legend (now it shows 0, 0, 0, 9.747 and 4265.757 which is not really 
> convenient. Passing some of the standard plot arguments didn't help (in 
> fact, nothing changed).

In general, bubble plots are not good visual aid, except when you happen to have
data for which they work well. They try to represent an additional dimention in
2-D, so there are bound to be problems if there is not enough space to do this
on a plot; additionally the scale is not linear, or something else we are use to
for comparing large differences (in case of your data). It may be better at
times to just label the data points, and let the reader choose the
interpretation, without representing relative size graphically. 

Please see a good book on Statistical Graphics.

http://www.math.yorku.ca/SCS/Gallery/

Search: Cleveland, and Tufte. 

Anupam.