multifactorial plotting in R: lattice

I've mentioned before in personal communications that if you have lots of factors in a data set you can just flatten out the data set and then use openoffice data pilot to pivot around different factors (also can be done in ruby with Ruport and 'pivot'). This is a good method.

There is a much better method I recently came across: "trellis plots". The package in R is called lattice.

This is clearly the way to quickly and neatly plot multifactorial data in lots of meaningful ways.

Some resources:

• Excellent Lecture on making trellis plots with lattice (pdf)
• some hype
• The online book on lattice
• code and figures from the book
• ** a table suggesting general forms for each type of plot (thanks Eldon)
  

In R (as sudo if you want system wide installation):

install.packages("lattice", dependencies=TRUE)  # I don't think there are any dependencies
library("lattice")