How to plot 'multiple box plots' in one plot?

Question

I have data in the following format:

  # repetition, packet, route, energy level
  1, 1, 1, 10.0
  1, 1, 2, 12.3
  1, 1, 3, 13.8
  1, 2, 1, 9.2
  1, 2, 2, 10         


        

Answer 1

If you're using ggplot2, you'll be able to do this quite nicely with facet_wrap, which can create multiple boxplots next to each other. For example:

library(ggplot2)
mydata = data.frame(x=as.factor(rep(1:2, 5, each=5)), y=rnorm(50),
        division=rep(letters[1:5], each=10))

print(ggplot(mydata, aes(x, y)) + geom_boxplot() + facet_wrap(~division))

In the case of your code, you look like you might actually want to divide by two variables (it's a little unclear). If you want to divide it by route and then by packet (as your example seems to suggest) you can use facet_grid:

print(ggplot(data, aes(repetition, energy.level)) + geom_boxplot() + facet_grid(route ~ packet))

However, note that since you have 99 packets this would end up being 99 graphs wide, so you probably want to try a different approach.