Graphics, Figures & Tables ⇒ Statistics and Histograms

[white_owl]

I need to draw several statistical charts. With histograms and boxplots (those two are the must!).

Which package can be of more use? For now I just draw everything manually in tikZ, results are pretty but it is very tedious task.

[localghost]

[…] Which package can be of more use? […]

Plotting can be done easier by special packages.

• pgfplots (based on PGF/tikZ)
• pst-plot (based on PSTricks)

Thorsten

[feuersaenger]

[EDIT: here a translated variant: sorry, my initial answer was accidentally in german]

Hi,

pgfplots kann compute and draw histograms.

The current "unstable" of pgfplots comes with a "statistics" library which supports boxplots. It can compute the statistics given some sample. It can also take precomputed statistics and visualize them. The unstable will be released eventually, but it can be installed from http://pgfplots.sourceforge.net/ . If you want to see if its features are what you need, you can inspect the online manual from http://pgfplots.sourceforge.net/pgfplots_unstable.pdf (section statistics library).

Kind regards

Christian

[reb_will123]

You can use the jqchart library jqPlot which is one of the plugin with nice features for doing creating various charts like bar char, pie chart or custom charts.

[mgmillani]

I generally use gnuplot to generate plots and charts, creating a png image.
As it can be a little complicated to find documentation for gnuplot at first, here is an example to help you get started:

Lets say this is a file called "plotter"

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# Sets the separator of each column,
# which means that every line of the input file should be in the format x:y
set datafile sep ':'
# writes the chart to a png with 1024 pixels of width and 768 of height
set terminal png size 1024,768
# where should the file be written
set output 'plot.png'
# distance between each tic in the x axis
set xtics 5
# names of the axes
set xlabel 'X'
set ylabel 'Y (in units)'
# where the legend should be placed
set key outside top
# what should be plotted
files = "file1 file2 file3"
titles = "A B C"
# plots every file, diving y by 1 million. Files are under the data folder
plot for[i=1:words(files)] 'data/'.word(files,i) u 1:($2/1e6) w lines lw 5 title word(titles,i)
# in case you want to plot only one file:
# plot "data/file1" with lines lw 5 title "A"
 
 
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where file1 is:

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1:200000
2:3000000
3:1050053
4:6543281
14:9879521
 
 
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file2:

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0:12346578
1.5:1000000
3:2365478
8:654975
 
 
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and file3:

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1:1000000
2:2000000
3:3000000
 
 
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and file1,file2,file3 are under the data folder.

Then you would run on a command line:

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gnuplot plotter
 
 
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and the plot would be written to "plot.png" .
You can also use gnuplot in a interactive way, in case you want to just test stuff, by just calling the program with no arguments.

I never used any plotting package for LaTeX, but I doubt any of the available ones is better than gnuplot.

[Johannes_B]

pgfplots is very powerful and when you want to plot some data to show in your document it is your first choice. Gnuplot can do some simple calculations (well, in fact pgfplots can calculate some stuff as well), but higher mathematics can't be done with both of them.
The statistics data, that Gnuplot can calc, but pgfplots can't can be written to a text file and fed to pgfplots, in order to print it.

Documentation for Gnuplot isn't really hard to find, it might be hard to find the right keyword.