According to modern recommendations in data viz, lollipop charts are generally a better alternative to bar charts, as they reduce the visual distortion caused by the length of the bars, making it easier to compare the values. So, in the next versions of the ‘modEvA‘ and ‘fuzzySim‘ packages, functions that produce bar plots will instead (by default) produce lollipop charts, using the new ‘lollipop’ function which will be included in ‘modEvA‘. I know ‘ggplot2‘ produces great lollipop charts already, but I like to keep my package dependencies to a minimum, or else they become much harder to maintain… So here’s the new function:

#' Title Lollipop chart
#'
#' @param x a numeric vector.
#' @param names a vector of the same length as 'x' with the names to be plotted below the lollipops. If this argument is left NULL and 'x' has names, then these will be used.
#' @param ymin numeric value for the lower limit of the y axis. The default is zero. If set to NA, the minimum of 'x' will be used.
#' @param sticks logical value indicating whether the sticks of the lollipops should be drawn. The default is TRUE.
#' @param col colour for the lollipops.
#' @param grid logical, whether or not to add a grid to the plot. The default is TRUE.
#' @param cex numeric value indicating the size of the lollipops. Will be passed as 'cex' to 'points' and as 'lwd' to 'arrows' (the lines or lollipop sticks).
#' @param cex.axis numeric value indicating the size of the x and y axis labels.
#' @param las argument to pass to 'plot' indicating the orientation of the axis labels.
#' @param ... additional arguments that can be used for the plot, e.g. 'main'.
#'
#' @return This function produces a lollipop chart of the values in 'x'.
#' @export
#'
#' @examples lollipop(mtcars[,1], names = rownames(mtcars), las = 2, ylab = names(mtcars)[1], cex.axis = 0.6, main = "Lollipop chart")

lollipop <- function(x, names = NULL, ymin = 0, sticks = TRUE, col = "royalblue", grid = TRUE, cex = 1, cex.axis = 1, las = 1, ...) {
  # version 1.0 (5 Jan 2023)

  if (is.na(ymin))  ymin <- min(x, na.rm = TRUE)
  plot(c(ymin, x), axes = FALSE, type = "n", xlab = "", ...)
  if (grid) grid()
  if (is.null(names)) names <- names(x)
  axis(1, at = 1:length(x), labels = names, las = las, cex.axis = cex.axis)
  axis(2, ylim = c(ymin, max(x, na.rm = TRUE)), cex.axis = cex.axis)
  points(x, pch = 20, col = col, cex = cex)
  if (sticks)  arrows(x0 = 1:length(x), x1 = 1:length(x), y0 = 0, y1 = x, length = 0, col = col, lwd = cex)
}

.

And here a use case with the ‘mtcars’ dataset of R, and a bar plot for comparison:

barplot(mtcars[,1], names = rownames(mtcars), las = 2, ylab = names(mtcars)[1], cex.names = 0.6, main = "Bar chart")
lollipop(mtcars[,1], names = rownames(mtcars), las = 2, ylab = names(mtcars)[1], cex.axis = 0.6, main = "Lollipop chart")

.

‘ymin’ is zero by default, but you can set it to NA for the minimum value:

lollipop(mtcars[,1], names = rownames(mtcars), las = 2, ylab = names(mtcars)[1], main = "Lollipop chart not starting at zero", ymin = NA)

Feedback welcome before I update the packages!