Visualization

Do not wait until the very final analysis stage to produce some publication quality graphics but produce fast (not necessarily nice) visualizations all the way through your data analysis. Otherwise you will not utilize the best neural network infrastructure you have available: your brain and it’s ability to identify patterns.

Basic plots in R

# Pseudocode
<plotting function>(<x-axis data>, <y-axis data>,…)

Visualizations 101

No matter if you produce publication quality graphics or quick and dirty visualizations, remember some guiding principles and traps illustrated in the figures below.

For further reading, have a look at e.g. Kelleher & Wagner 2011. To get some inspiration, the R Graph Gallery is also a good place to start (but it relies on the ggplot2 library, not on the basic R plotting functions).