How can I overlay two dense scatter plots so that I can see the outlines of each in R or Matlab?

Question

See this example

This was created in matlab by making two scatter plots indepe

Answer 1

Use the transparency capability of color descriptions. You can define a color as a sequence of four 2-byte words: muddy <- "#888888FF" . The first three pairs set the RGB colors (00 to FF); the final pair sets the transparency level.

Answer 2

Using ggplot2 you can add together two geom_point's and make them transparent using the alpha parameter. ggplot2 als adds up transparency, and I think this is what you want. This should work, although I haven't run this.

dat = data.frame(x = runif(1000), y = runif(1000), cat = rep(c("A","B"), each = 500))
ggplot(aes(x = x, y = y, color = cat), data = dat) + geom_point(alpha = 0.3)

ggplot2 is awesome!

This is an example of calculating and drawing a convex hull:

library(automap)
library(ggplot2)
library(plyr)
loadMeuse()
theme_set(theme_bw())

meuse = as.data.frame(meuse)
chull_per_soil = ddply(meuse, .(soil), 
           function(sub) sub[chull(sub$x, sub$y),c("x","y")])

ggplot(aes(x = x, y = y), data = meuse) +
  geom_point(aes(size = log(zinc), color = ffreq)) +
  geom_polygon(aes(color = soil), data = chull_per_soil, fill = NA) +
  coord_equal()

which leads to the following illustration:

Answer 3

You could first export the two data sets as bitmap images, re-import them, add transparency:

library(grid)

N <- 1e7 # Warning: slow
d <- data.frame(x1=rnorm(N),
                x2=rnorm(N, 0.8, 0.9),
                y=rnorm(N, 0.8, 0.2),
                z=rnorm(N, 0.2, 0.4))

v <- with(d, dataViewport(c(x1,x2),c(y, z)))

png("layer1.png", bg="transparent")
with(d, grid.points(x1,y, vp=v,default="native",pch=".",gp=gpar(col="blue")))
dev.off()
png("layer2.png", bg="transparent")
with(d, grid.points(x2,z, vp=v,default="native",pch=".",gp=gpar(col="red")))
dev.off()

library(png)
i1 <- readPNG("layer1.png", native=FALSE)
i2 <- readPNG("layer2.png", native=FALSE)

ghostize <- function(r, alpha=0.5)
  matrix(adjustcolor(rgb(r[,,1],r[,,2],r[,,3],r[,,4]), alpha.f=alpha), nrow=dim(r)[1])

grid.newpage()
grid.rect(gp=gpar(fill="white"))
grid.raster(ghostize(i1))
grid.raster(ghostize(i2))

you can add these as layers in, say, ggplot2.

Answer 4

AFAIK, your best option with Matlab is to just make your own plot function. The scatter plot points unfortunately do not yet have a transparency attribute so you cannot affect it. However, if you create, say, most crudely, a bunch of loops which draw many tiny circles, you can then easily give them an alpha value and obtain a transparent set of data points.