how to make box plot with R with interrupted Y axis

Question

This is a sample of my data. It's a tab delimited file with a header.

X1      X2      X3      X4
1.3     0.5     0.1     1
NA      0.3     0.4     3
NA      0.2     0.3     0.3
NA      0.1     3       0.2
NA      27      5       56
NA      NA      10      0.01

I would like to get a boxplot from this data. The problem is that I want to interrupt the plot at 10 and 50 on Y-axis. I want a bigger plot size before 10 and a smaller plot size after that. I don't know how to plot with 2 gaps in Y-axis. I tried with axis.break and gap.boxplot but as my programming skills with R are very limited so I am unable to use both of these methods properly. I'd be grateful for any hints to accomplish this?

X1 X2 X3 X4
1.344827586 0.5 0.1 1
NA 0.3 0.4 3
NA 0.2 0.3 0.3
NA 0.1 3 0.2
NA 27 5 56
NA NA 10 0.01 — vaqaar dar, Feb 27 '13 at 18:57
I don't know why my file is shown as one line. It has 7 rows and 4 columns. — vaqaar dar, Feb 27 '13 at 18:58
Hi welcome to stack overflow. The comments box offers less formatting options. Please use the proper body of the question. (You should see an option to edit your question) — Ricardo Saporta, Feb 27 '13 at 19:00
@vaqaardar, I've edited the post. What do you mean "interrupt the plot".. Is there an image you can link us to as to how you'd like the plot to look like? — Arun, Feb 27 '13 at 19:01
http://rgm3.lab.nig.ac.jp/RGM/r_function?p=plotrix&f=gap.boxplot — vaqaar dar, Feb 27 '13 at 19:09
http://rgm3.lab.nig.ac.jp/RGM/r_function?p=plotrix&f=gap.boxplot — vaqaar dar, Feb 27 '13 at 19:11
the 2 links posted above have gapped box plots but on the upper and lower blocks there is no Y-axis labelling shown. — vaqaar dar, Feb 27 '13 at 19:12
this example has Y-axis labelled after the gap as well but this is not a box plot. — vaqaar dar, Feb 27 '13 at 19:12
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12427376/rescale-axis-in-grouped-scatter-plots-with-use-of-axes-breaks — vaqaar dar, Feb 27 '13 at 19:13
Please let me know if I need to explain my question with more examples? — vaqaar dar, Feb 27 '13 at 19:18
I get a warning message that some data points are in the gap. Also, I cannot label the Y-axis after the break. I tried using axis.break but the Y-axis labelling gets reversed after the break. — vaqaar dar, Feb 27 '13 at 20:09

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 27 '13 at 19:59

I'm not really clear on what you want, and what you mean by "bigger plot size before 10 and a smaller plot size after that". Do you mean different scales? That is a bad idea, I think, and I don't believe it would be straightforward.

Here's how to break the axis twice (I'm guessing on the regions to exclude):

library(plotrix)
library(reshape2)
a <- read.table(textConnection("X1 X2 X3 X4
        1.3 0.5 0.1 1
        NA 0.3 0.4 3
        NA 0.2 0.3 0.3
        NA 0.1 3 0.2
        NA 27 5 56
        NA NA 10 0.01"),sep=" ",header=T)
am <-melt(a) #from reshape2 - allows categorical variables to be in one column
gap.boxplot(am$value ~ am$variable, #means the values are plotted againsy variable
gap=list(top=c(30,50),bottom=c(10,24)), #specifies regions of Y axis to exclude
axis.labels=T) #should label all the Y axis, doesn't seem to work well

enter image description here

Can anyone please fix it? Thank you! – vaqaar dar Feb 27 '13 at 20:13 — vaqaar dar, Feb 27 '13 at 20:13

how to make box plot with R with interrupted Y axis

1 Answers1