Bar charts and plots

In this section, I will show you how to generate bar charts and bar plots using R. I think whether you call a particular graphic a bar chart or a bar plot is up to you. There are minor differences between bar charts and bar plots. In both cases, we have bars representing counts; we display them across your graphic. The steps (and results) involved are similar.

Bar plot

R programming allows us to create bar charts in a variety of ways. The standard function in R is the barplot function. The barplot function only requires a list of the heights to be displayed. All of the following parameters are optional.

Usage

The barplot function is used as follows:

> barplot(data)

The various parameters are as follows:

        height, width = 1, space = NULL,
        names.arg = NULL, legend.text = NULL, beside = FALSE,
        horiz = FALSE, density = NULL, angle = 45,
        col = NULL, border = par("fg"),
        main = NULL, sub = NULL, xlab = NULL, ylab = NULL,
        xlim = NULL...