In the early 1990s, Richard Becker and William Cleveland (two researchers at Bell Labs) built a revolutionary new system for displaying data called Trellis graphics. (You can find more information about the Trellis software at http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/departments/sia/project/trellis/.) Cleveland devised a number of novel plots for visualizing data based on research into how users visualize information.[41]
The lattice package is an
implementation of Trellis graphics in R.[42] You may notice that some functions still contain the Trellis
name. The lattice package includes many
types of charts that will be familiar to most readers, such as scatter
plots, bar charts, and histograms. But it also includes some plots that
you may not have seen before, such as dot plots, strip plots, and
quantile-quantile plots. This chapter will show you how to use different
types of charts, familiar and unfamiliar, in the lattice
package.
[41] See [Cleveland1993] for more information.
[42] It’s not exactly the same as the S version, but unless you want to use old S/S+ code, the differences probably will not matter to you.