Lattice is best thought of as an implementation of Trellis Graphics
for R. Its interface is based on the implementation in S-PLUS,
but there are several differences. To the extent possible, care has
been taken to ensure that existing Trellis code written for S-PLUS
works unchanged (or with minimal change) in Lattice. If you are having
problems porting S-PLUS code, read the entry for panel in
the documentation for xyplot. The Lattice website
referenced below has some useful material as well.
Most high level Trellis functions in S-PLUS are implemented, with the
exception of piechart.
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 trellis.par.set.
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. Also described there are the
possibilities to enhance the plots thus produced (using locator
like functionality).
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 (similar to image plots in R)
contourplot contour plots
cloud 3-D scatter plots
wireframe 3-D surfaces (similar to persp plots in R)
Hypervariate:
splom scatterplot matrix
parallel parallel coordinate plots
Miscellaneous:
rfs residual and fitted value plot (also see
oneway)
tmd Tukey Mean-Difference plot
Lattice also has a collection of convenience functions that correspond
to the base graphics primitives lines,
points, etc. They are implemented using Grid graphics,
but try to be as close to the base versions as possible in terms of
their argument list. These functions have imaginative names like
llines are are often useful when writing (or porting
from S-PLUS code) nontrivial panel functions.