Constructing a sunflower plot

Sunflower plot, as the name suggests, looks like a sunflower drawn in a 2D space. The sunflower plots are used as variants of scatter plots to display bivariate distribution. When the density of data increases in a particular region of a plot, it becomes hard to read. Each petal in a sunflower plot represents an observation; hence, sunflower plots can deal with high-density data. Hexbin plots, discussed later in the chapter, are also an alternative to resolving the issue of overlapping observations in a scatter plot. Dupont and Plummer Jr. (2003) provide an insightful discussion on the advantages of using a sunflower plot over scatter plots in case of high-density datasets.

Sunflower plots are available with the basic R plotting package, and we can learn more about their various arguments by typing ?sunflowerplot in the R Console window.

Getting ready

The plot is constructed using the Galton data available with the HistData package in R. Galton data comprises two...