Constructing a 3D scatter plot
A 3D scatter plot is a great tool for visualizing multivariate data. Adding a third dimension to the existing plot helps in revealing information and portraying data from a newer angle. Even higher dimensions, such as the fourth and fifth, can be visualized by making use of color and shape attributes. We will implement this recipe using the plot3D package. The following screenshot shows a 3D scatter plot:
Getting ready
To implement a scatter plot in 3D, we will need to install and load the plot3D package in R. The manual for the package is available on the CRAN website http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/plot3D/plot3D.pdf.
How to do it…
The package is installed and loaded in R using the install.packages() and library() functions respectively in R.
install.packages("plot3D")
library(plot3D)The data used in generating the scatter plot is part of the book titled An Introduction to Statistical Learning, Gareth James, Daniela Witten, Trevor Hastie, and Robert Tibshirani...
