R Scatter Plot: symbol color represents number of overlapping points

Question

Scatter plots can be hard to interpret when many points overlap, as such overlapping obscures the density of data in a particular region. One solution is to use semi-transp

Answer 1

You can use smoothScatter for this.

colramp = colorRampPalette(c('white', 'blue', 'green', 'yellow', 'red'))
smoothScatter(x1, x2, colramp=colramp)

Answer 2

One option is to use densCols() to extract kernel densities at each point. Mapping those densities to the desired color ramp, and plotting points in order of increasing local density gets you a plot much like those in the linked article.

## Data in a data.frame
x1 <- rnorm(n=1E3, sd=2)
x2 <- x1*1.2 + rnorm(n=1E3, sd=2)
df <- data.frame(x1,x2)

## Use densCols() output to get density at each point
x <- densCols(x1,x2, colramp=colorRampPalette(c("black", "white")))
df$dens <- col2rgb(x)[1,] + 1L

## Map densities to colors
cols <-  colorRampPalette(c("#000099", "#00FEFF", "#45FE4F", 
                            "#FCFF00", "#FF9400", "#FF3100"))(256)
df$col <- cols[df$dens]

## Plot it, reordering rows so that densest points are plotted on top
plot(x2~x1, data=df[order(df$dens),], pch=20, col=col, cex=2)

Answer 3

You can get a similar effect by doing hexagonal binning, divide the region into hexagons, color each hexagon based on the number of points in the hexagon. The hexbin package has functions to do this and there are also functions in the ggplot2 package.