Make Frequency Histogram for Factor Variables

Question

I am very new to R, so I apologize for such a basic question. I spent an hour googling this issue, but couldn\'t find a solution.

Say I have some categorical data in

Answer 1

The reason you are getting the unexpected result is that hist(...) calculates the distribution from a numeric vector. In your code, table(animalFactor) behaves like a numeric vector with three elements: 1, 3, 7. So hist(...) plots the number of 1's (1), the number of 3's (1), and the number of 7's (1). @Roland's solution is the simplest.

Here's a way to do this using ggplot:

library(ggplot2)
ggp <- ggplot(data.frame(animals),aes(x=animals))
# counts
ggp + geom_histogram(fill="lightgreen")
# proportion
ggp + geom_histogram(fill="lightblue",aes(y=..count../sum(..count..)))

You would get precisely the same result using animalFactor instead of animals in the code above.