Grammar of Graphics with Julia

Arindam Basu
7 min readMay 6, 2023

… Let’s start with Gadfly

If you have done any kind of data analysis you know that good visualisation is key to everything: you can see if your data are tidy enough, and you can identify what models to use. It sits between your data tidying and data modelling.

What’s the best strategy to plot graphs and visualisations? Leland Wilkinson wrote, IMHO, the most definitive textbook on the topic named “The Grammar of Graphics” where he laid out the visual elements that make up visualisations. Read the book here:

Hadley Wickham ported the concepts to R statistical system with ggplot2, and wrote a summary paper you can read here. I strongly recommend that you read the paper. In my opinion, it is perhaps the most authoratitative introduction to the concept from a programming perspective. Do not miss it, here is the link:

In Julia, you can use Gadfly and AlgebraOfGraphics packages to map the concepts of Grammar of Graphics. I find Gadfly to be more intuitive of the…

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Arindam Basu
Arindam Basu

Written by Arindam Basu

Medical Doctor and an Associate Professor of Epidemiology and Environmental Health at the University of Canterbury. Founder of TwinMe,

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