Question

I would like to plot a simple graphic. I have a dat set with n rowns and k columns, in which each row has a a sequence of 0 and 1. I would like to plot exactly this sequence for all rows.

Actually I want to reproduce the figure 24.1, p. 516, of Gelman and Hill’s book (Data aAnalysis Using Regression and Multilevel/Hierarchical Models). I suspect that he made the graphic in Latex, but it seems quite ridiculous that I’m not able to repplicate this simple graphic in R. The figue is something like this. As you can see from the link, the “ones” are replaced by “S” and “zeros” by “.”. It’s a simple graphic, but it shows each individual response by time.

Answer 1

I would go with a formatted text output using sprintf. Much cleaner and simpler. If you still want a plot, you could go with the following:

Given matrix tbl containing your data:

tbl <- matrix(data=rep(0:1,25), nrow=5)

You can generate a plot as:

plot(1, 1, xlim=c(1,dim(tbl)[2]+.5), ylim=c(0.5,dim(tbl)[1]), type="n")
lapply(1:dim(tbl)[1], function(x) {
  text(x=c(1:dim(tbl)[2]), y=rep(x,dim(tbl)[2]), labels=tbl[x,])
})

Using this as a base you can play around with the text and plot args to stylize the plot the way you wish.