Lattice is an implementation of Trellis Graphics for R. Its interface
is based on the implementation in S-Plus, although there are several
differences. Existing Trellis code written for S-Plus should
ideally work unchanged (or with minimal change) in Lattice. One
exception to this is when custom panel functions are used. See the
entry for panel in help(xyplot) for help with this aspect.
As of now, most high level Trellis functions in S-Plus have been
implemented, although the 3d display functions (notably
wireframe and contourplot) are often buggy and
inefficient.
Lattice is built upon the Grid Graphics engine for R being developed
by Paul Murrell and requires the grid add-on package.
Type library(help = lattice) to see a list of (public)
Lattice graphics functions for which further documentation is
available. Apart from the documentation accompanying this package,
several documents outlining the use of Trellis graphics is available
from Bell Lab's website that might provide a holistic introduction to
the Trellis paradigm. Lattice also has a website with some tips.
Cleveland, W.S. (1993) Visualizing Data.
Becker, R.A., Cleveland, W.S. and Shyu, M. ``The Visual Design and Control of Trellis Display'', Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics
Lattice Webpage:
xyplot. To learn how to customise the Graphical parameters used by the Lattice
functions, see lattice.theme and lset.
To learn how to initialise new devices or change the settings of the
current device, see trellis.device
To learn about sophisticated (non-default) printing capabilities, see
print.trellis.
Here is a list of `high level' functions in the Lattice library with a brief description of what they do:
Univariate:
barchart bar plots
bwplot box and whisker plots
densityplot kernel density plots
dotplot dot plots
histogram histograms
qqmath quantile plots against mathematical distributions
stripplot 1-dimensional scatterplot
Bivariate:
qq q-q plot for comparing two distributions
xyplot scatter plot (and possibly a lot more)
Trivariate:
levelplot level plots (image plots in R)
Hypervariate:
splom scatterplot matrix
parallel parallel coordinate plots
Miscellaneous:
rfs residual and fitted value plot (also see
oneway)
See llines if you need to write/port nontrivial panel
functions.