Introduction

Three-dimensional images (pie charts or histograms), contours, surface plots, and scatter plots are great tools for analyzing multivariate data. Data that comprises more than two variables or densities, or even data with a high volume (medical or geosciences data), can be studied in detail when the third dimension is added. In this chapter, we will study different ways to analyze multivariate datasets, create interactive plots, and also learn to animate plots in R.

This chapter will introduce users to the scatterplot3d, plot3D, rgl, and animation packages. The readers should note that new R packages are developed on a regular basis and you might be able to find better packages. At present, these are some of the most useful packages available to plot 3D and interactive plots.

This chapter consists of four main sections. The first section is an introduction to plotting 3D scatter plots, the second section discusses ways to generate a 3D histogram and a pie chart, the third section...