#gapminder data

Spent the afternoon poking around in R and plotting three of the four variables that I am interested in from the Gapminder dataset: Income, Life Expectancy, and Armed Forces Rate. I did a frequency plot of the fourth variable - Level of Democracy - the other day.

I made several different plots for the variables, each having its own way of displaying the data. This gives us a more comprehensive characterization and understanding of the variable.

Let's start with Life Expectancy. I have three plots: A box plot, a histogram, and a dot chart (I did the same for the other variables).

Income is next. I added a histogram and a box plot on a log scale so we could better see the distribution.

The dot chart looks like this:

Finally, I have the same three types of charts for the Armed Forces Rate (i.e., the size of a country's armed forces as a percentage of the population):

For the dot chart, there are too many countries to clearly list them on the y-axis. However, the observations are in the same order of countries that we find in the Gapminder dataset.

It's a challenge to figure out all the formatting commands and labeling quirks of R. For instance, some of the titles in the Armed Forces series of charts are cut off because I haven't quite figured out how to set plot areas and margins. Nor do I have the proper log numbers on the x-axis for the log-scale income charts, but I think you can get the gist of what the data are saying. Now, to do the same thing in SAS!

OK, figured out how to get the plots into the text entry of the blog. Here's the first frequency chart:

I've also made box plots of the other three variables I'm exploring. These are continuous variables and don't lend themselves to bar charts. I'll post those box plots and some histograms in a bit.

Thanks to those who walked me through getting images into Tumblr.

Here's the same plot in color.