CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rsas
datanalytics.com
datanalytics.com

Reputation: 996

Implementations of "The grammar of graphics" in statistical packages

I am aware that Leland Wikinson's ideas, as exposed in his book "The Grammar of Graphics" underlie ggplot2 implementation in R.

But are there other implementations of the same ideas in other statistical packages (SAS or other)?

Upvotes: 9

Views: 1106

Answers (4)

Joris Meys
Joris Meys

Reputation: 108583

It is not exactly the same, but SAS has (since 9.2) the ODS Graphics system in place. This graphics system is also based on the same foundation, and if you look at the examples here, you immediately notice the similarities in layout and buildup of these graphs and the ones in ggplot2.

THe idea is here to just get the graphs from the analysis, so you specify the content of the graph at the same time you specify your analysis. Then there is the template language for the ODS graphics to allow you to create your custom graphs. This is something I still miss a bit in ggplot2. But ggplot2 is quite a lot easier.

Upvotes: 6

civilstat
civilstat

Reputation: 426

Python now has its own ggplot port.

Also, Tableau is a visualization system based firmly on the Grammar of Graphics (Wilkinson himself works there now). But I'm not sure if this counts, since it's not part of a pre-existing statistical package.

Upvotes: 0

xealits
xealits

Reputation: 4576

It seems IBM does some visualization tools with grammar of graphics inside. They say their backend -- Rapidly Adaptive Visualization Engine (RAVE) -- is based on it. And recently I found this overview-article about VizJSON -- a language to describe charts, which is apparently some variation of JSON. (I don't really know about SPSS, Many Eyes and the connection between them and other IBM's software. Probably SPSS is the back-end for Many Eyes... Probably VizJSON is the next step to their GPL... Whatever -- it is closed proprietary stuff anyway)

Also there is D3.js. It is open, BSD license. It is a javascript library. Here "javascript" does not mean "web only": you can make SVG files with your plots (and probably they will or already do support more). But it means that you need to know bunch of Web technologies: HTML, Javascript, DOM, CSS etc (+ maybe javascript's package manager..). And also people say it is quite a low-level library.

There is a more high-level tool, based on D3.js -- Vega.

I am not very savvy in these tools and cannot be totally sure about this information ;)

Upvotes: 1

Btibert3
Btibert3

Reputation: 40176

In SPSS, the Chart Builder was built upon the same foundation. I could be wrong, but I think SPSS implemented it as "GPL." IMHO, Hadley's ggplot2 is much easier to learn and there are mounds of examples online; I haven't seen many examples of graphics built with GPL.

Not to mention, R can be obtained for the price of free.

Upvotes: 9

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