Introduction

The main motivation behind this chapter is to introduce the basics of plotting in R and an element of interactivity via the googleVis package. The basic plots are important as many packages developed in R use basic plot arguments and hence understanding them creates a good foundation for new R users. We will start by exploring the scatter plots in R, which are the most basic plots for exploratory data analysis, and then delve into interactive plots. Every section will start with an introduction to basic R plots and we will build interactive plots thereafter. We will utilize the power of R analytics and implement them using the googleVis package to introduce the element of interactivity.

The googleVis package is developed by Google and it uses the Google Chart API to create interactive plots. There are a range of plots available with the googleVis package and this provides us with an advantage to plot the same data on various plots and select the one that delivers an effective...