Question

I am using the ABC package in R which computes several statistics that can be plotted. Using
plot( the results as matrix from another function in the package ) or
summary( the results as matrix from another function in the package )
several plots/statistics are displayed.
I am interested to get the maximum value of one of the graphs that is displayed. However, the values of the plotted graphs are not returned or used in the input matrix.
How can I get them, or how can I see what function was applied to construct the graph?

Answer 1

Generally, to view the code for S3 methods, you would type the generic method, followed by a dot. followed by the S3 class. For example, to view the code dispatched on a glm object by the method summary:

summary.glm

Same rule applies for the abc package, however it seems that the authors have not exported their methods into the namespace. Thus, you have to specify the abc package namespace. Try:

abc:::summary.abc
abc:::plot.abc
abc:::hist.abc

for summary(), plot(), hist(), respectively.

As Joshua notes, the str() function is helpful to view how data is stored in an object. For example, after running example(abc) to generate the examples from the abc vignette, the object lin2 is produced, which is of class abc. Trying str(lin2) shows how the data is stored. Then if you wanted to see the adjusted values for lin2, you could try lin2$adj.values.