CIpirateplot

pirateplot(), by Nathaniel Phillips, is an excellent function that creates plots which combine a bar plot, a violin plot (beanplot), and a univariate scatter plot. The resulting plots show both group means (like a barplot or point plot would) and a visual representation of the data distribution (like a histogram, violin plot, or scatter plot would). As such, they are a great alternative to bar plots (see, e.g., Page Piccinini's post describing problems with barplots).

However, one reason I have traditionally used barplots is because, as someone whose research hypotheses are usually about mean differences, I usually want to be able to plot 95% confidence intervals that will help readers make quick-and-dirty inferences about comparisons between various means. Adding such intervals as error bars on a bar plot or point plot is straightforward. The pirate plot, unfortunately, doesn't have a built-in way to add error bars, and indeed I suspect that manually adding error bars on top of all its other stuff would look quite messy. (Plus, putting error bars onto a bar plot is easy because the barplot() function returns a list of x-axis values of the midpoints of the bars, which is helpful for figuring out where to plot the error bars; pirateplot() does not do this, although this might not be a big issue, because there might be other simple ways to place the error bars.)

The function described below is a modification of the original pirateplot() function to plot confidence intervals. pirateplot() can plot a shaded interval representing the Bayesian 95% highest density interval. Since I don't usually need to plot that, I have adapted the code to use that shaded interval to plot confidence intervals instead. Examples and usage notes are given below.

Usage requirements. The function (along with some other functions, including a function for Cousineau-Morey confidence intervals that this function uses) is available at http://www.polyu.edu.hk/cbs/sjpolit/Steve_functions.txt. The easiest way to get access is to run source( url( "http://www.polyu.edu.hk/cbs/sjpolit/Steve_functions.txt" ) ) during your R session. The package "yarrr" must be installed (see the documentation for the original pirateplot(), linked above, for instructions how). Like in a usual barplot, you can only plot two factors at once; to plot more factors (e.g., to plot a three-way interaction) you need multiple plots arranged together.

Options. Most of the options are the same as for the original pirateplot(), described here. However, there are some special options specifically related to the handling of confidence intervals.

# Load the function
source( url( "http://www.polyu.edu.hk/cbs/sjpolit/Steve_functions.txt" ) )

### A pirate plot for non-repeated-measures data
airquality$Month <- factor( airquality$Month )
CIpirateplot( Temp~Month, airquality, ci.o=.5, bar.o=.2 )

## Warning: closing unused connection 5 (http://www.mypolyuweb.hk/~sjpolit/
## Steve_functions.txt)

### A repeated-measures, fully within-subjects design, with within-subject CIs
library(ordinal)
CIpirateplot( response~temp, wine, grouping.var="judge", CI.type="within", ci.o=.5, bar.o=.2 )

# what that would have looked like if we used between-subject CIs
CIpirateplot( response~temp, wine, grouping.var="judge", CI.type="between", ci.o=.5, bar.o=.2 )

# Plot for a factorial within-subject design, and with a legend
CIpirateplot( response~temp+contact, wine, grouping.var="judge", CI.type="within", ci.o=.5, bar.o=.2, make.legend=T )

### A pirate plot for a design with repeated-measures data but between-subject conditions,
###	such that we want between-subject CIs but we still need to specify a grouping.var
CIpirateplot( weight~Diet, ChickWeight, grouping.var="Chick", CI.type="between", ci.o=.5, bar.o=.2 )

CIpirateplot()

`CIpirateplot()`