Plot Histogram with Points Instead of Bars

Question

Here is a question for R-users. I am interested in drawing a histogram with points stacked up, instead of a bar. For example if the data is (1,1,2,1,2,3,3,3,4,4), then I would like to see three points stacked up at 1, 2 points stacked up at 2 and so on. What is the best way to do this in R?

Answer 1

Greg Snow's TeachingDemos package contains a dots(x, ...) function which seems to fit your need:

dots( round( rnorm(50, 10,3) ) )

Answer 2

You can do this yourself pretty quickly:

x <- c(1,1,2,1,2,3,3,3,4,4)
plot(sort(x), sequence(table(x)))

Answer 3

The simplest answer I know is this:

x <- c(1,1,2,1,2,3,3,3,4,4)
stripchart(x,method="stack",at=0)

It's better than Jonathan Chang's suggestion because stripchart does proper stacking of points.

Answer 4

Another easy way would be:

x <- c(1,1,2,1,2,3,3,3,4,4)
myhist <- hist(x)
myhistX <- myhist$mids
myhistY <- myhist$density

And now you can plot it in any way you like:

plot(myhistY~myhistX)

This way you can change the stacking options when building a "histogram" object.