Creating visualizations of large data sets is a tough problem: with a limited number of pixels available on the screen (or just with the limited visual acuity of the human eye), massive numbers of symbols on the page can easily result in an uninterpretable mess. On Friday we shared one way of tackling the problem using Revolution R Enterprise: hexagonal binning charts. Relatedly, RStudio's chief scientist Hadley Wickham is taking a comprehensive approach to big-data visualization with his new open-source bigviz package, currently available on GitHub. (Disclaimer: early development of this package was funded by Revolution Analytics.)
The basic idea of the package is to use aggregation and smoothing techniques on big data sets before plotting, to create visualizations that give meaningful insights into the data, and that can be computed quickly and rendered efficiently using R's standard graphics engine. Despite the large data sets involved, the visualization functions in the pacakge are fast, because the "bin-summarise-smooth" cycle is performed directly in C++, direcly on the R object stored in memory. The system is described in detail in this Infovis preprint, and includes this example chart using the famous airline data:
The bigvis package is available for installation now on GitHub (use the devtools package to make the install easier). You can find installation instructions and links to the documentation in the README file linked below.
GitHub (Hadley Wickham): bigvis package
I've tried
install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("bigvis")
It downloads the package but it says:
Error: Command failed (1)
I've googled it and found that can be related with path spaces.
i've downloaded the zip tarball and tried to install "from local zip". It creates a subfolder in the library folder but it doesn't add any item to the packages menus. then I can't load it.
How can I solve this problem keeping R in C:\program files\...
Posted by: skan | April 09, 2013 at 18:22
I also get an error
> devtools::install_github("bigvis")
Installing github repo(s) bigvis/master from hadley
Installing bigvis.zip from https://github.com/hadley/bigvis/archive/master.zip
Error in function (type, msg, asError = TRUE) :
Could not resolve host: github.com; No data record of requested type
Posted by: gnireaht | April 10, 2013 at 05:26
That's odd - I tried:
install.packages('devtools')
library(devtools)
install_github('bigvis')
and it worked.
Are you behind a proxy, or something similar?
Posted by: Piers Harding | April 11, 2013 at 01:32
Hi
Where can I find the commands used to get those results and graphics?
bigvis.pdf doesn't explain it.
regards
Posted by: amparo | May 03, 2013 at 16:19
amparo - I think what you are looking for is here https://github.com/hadley/bigvis-infovis .
Cheers,
Piers Harding
Posted by: Piers Harding | May 07, 2013 at 00:15
Rtools are required!
http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/Rtools/
Posted by: anonymous | May 17, 2013 at 13:54
All I can produce is "object 'storage' not found", no matter what I do or what kind of data I used! Even for something as simple as bin(runif(10)). The capabilities looked brilliant at last night's LondonR meeting, and I routinely work on millions of row/columns, so if anyone has any idea? Regards, Paul.
"R version 3.0.0 (2013-04-03)" on Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise via RStudio 0.97.551.
Posted by: Paul | July 17, 2013 at 03:54