[R] barplot as histogram

Jesse Brown
Fri, 04 Nov 2011 18:04:01 -0000

Hello:

I'm dealing with an issue currently that I'm not sure the best way to
approach. I've got a very large (10G+) dataset that I'm trying to create
a histogram for. I don't seem to be able to use hist directly as I can
not create an R vector of size greater than 2.2G. I considered
condensing the data  previous to loading it into R  and just plotting
the frequencies as a barplot; unfortunately, barplot does not support
plotting the values according to a set of x-axis positions.

What I have is something similar to:

ys <- c(12,3,7,22,10)
xs <- c(1,30,35,39,60)

and I'd like the bars (ys) to appear at the positions described by xs. I
can get this to work on smaller sets by filling zero values in for
missing ys for the entire range of xs but in my case this would again
create a vector too large for R.

Is there another way to use the two vectors to create a simulated
frequency histogram? Is there a way to create a histogram object (as
returned by hist) from the condensed data so that plot would handle it
correctly?

Thanks in advance,

Jesse