Question

I am trying to plot a ratio but my problem is that when the dividend is larger than the divisor my quotient can be as high as possible. When the divisor is larger than the dividend the quotient is between 0 and 1. That is fine, but when I plot out the results the ratios with the larger dividend take up a huge portion of the plot and the smaller dividend ratios are limited to a much smaller area. Is there a way to show ratios on a plot (hopefully using base plots) where the dividend is five times greater than the divisor will take up the same amount of space as when the divisor is five times greater than the dividend.

Here is some sample data:

x=1:10
y=10:1
ratioxy=x/y

The data is:

x
[1]  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9 10
y
[1] 10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1
ratioxy
[1]  0.1000000  0.2222222  0.3750000  0.5714286  0.8333333  1.2000000  1.7500000  2.6666667
[9]  4.5000000 10.0000000

When I do this:

plot(ratioxy,type='l',col='blue')
abline(h=1)

I get this:

All I can think of is somehow playing around with the quotients in ratioxy that are less than one, but nothing is coming to me right now.

Answer 1

Try using a logarithmic scale.

plot(ratioxy,type=’l’,col=’blue’)