How can I find all R packages that include graphics functions?

Question

I always have difficulty in finding all available alternative ways to produce a specific graph, either one that I have already decided to use (looking for different variations) or one that I have not yet thought of.

The R Graphical Manual site provides a complete list of samples of R's graphics functions, however it's easier for me to search providing a package name (how else -for example- can I get a resultset including superbarplot function, when I want to look for barplots?. Let alone that the superbarplot graph does not appear in the results even if I try searching for it's package: UsingR)

The R-SAS-SPSS Add-on Module Comparison - and especially on topic Graphics, Static in the table provided - gave me the idea that it would be nice to have a place where all relevant packages are listed by topic.

Do you have any idea about something like that?

score 4 · Answer 1 · answered Jan 28 '10 at 22:31

4

If you're interested in learning about all the possible graphics you can make, you should learn about the grammar of graphics, and (my) implementation of it in R: ggplot2.

answered Jan 28 '10 at 22:31

hadley

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:) I agree to a point and I assure you that I have put much effort trying to learn it. However some times I prefer being able to have a choise between several different solutions instead o making one up. – gd047 Jan 29 '10 at 06:36

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 07 '10 at 14:46

Your question, or the general pattern anyway, was clearly a primary use case for the design of the sos package.

sos actually goes one step further that your question requires by identifying particular functions with packages; in addition, it ranks the results by relevance (by default, you can change the default behavior via the "sortby" parameter, e.g., sortby="Date")

Here's how it works:

most of this package's functionality is exposed via the "findFn" command

for instance, if you want a list of all functions and the parent package related to scatter plots:

findFn("scatter plot", maxPages=2, sortby="TotalScore")

This returns a dataframe formatted as HTML table and delivered in your default browser (if you don't want it to pop-up immediately, then just bind the function call to a variable and then call the variable when you're ready)

The right-most column of the dataframe/HTML page is "Description and Link". Clicking an entry in that column opens another tab in your browser (according to the user-set preferences set in your browser) with the complete R help page for that function.

The results from the function call above show, for instance, that the functions for plotting data in a 'scatter plot' format are found in the following packages:

ade4 (function: scatter)
IDPmisc (functions: ipairs, iplots)
GGally (function: ggally_points)
PerformanceAnalytics (function: chart.Scatter)
mclust (function: clPairs)

Another example:

findFn("boxplot", maxPages=2, sortby="TotalScore")

identifies these (among others) packages/functions for plotting boxplots:

sfsmisc (function: boxplot.matrix)
aplpack (function: boxplot2D)
NADA (function: boxplot-methods)
StatDA (function: rg.boxplot)
plotrix (function: gap.boxplot)
gplots (function: boxplot.n)
multcompView (function: multcompBoxplot)
oligo (function: boxplot)

score 2 · Answer 3 · answered Jan 28 '10 at 19:13

2

Have you seen the R Graph Gallery ?

Other than that, you may have to index all the source code of CRAN packages to search efficiently...

answered Jan 28 '10 at 19:13

Dirk Eddelbuettel

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Yes, R Graph Gallery is a site that I use very often (I also use this one http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Created_with_R ). I didn't understand how code indexing is done. Could you explain it? – gd047 Jan 28 '10 at 19:46
You would have to download all sources, unpack them, grep for instances of plot(), xyplot(), ... and index that for your convenience. I was trying to say that I doubt such a meta-index exists. That is, outside of the existing R-search engines like Rseek.org etc. – Dirk Eddelbuettel Jan 28 '10 at 20:36