Sunday, March 11, 2012

3-D Scatter Plots Redux

One weakness of Stata versus R is the lack of 3-D graphing capabilities, in particular 3-D scatter plots. However, with some modifications, Stata can indeed provide a suitable substitute for R in most graphical problems, as shown here (I use the infamous auto data set available in Stata with the sysuse command). The main weakness is that the x-y and y-z planes do not have grid lines; nevertheless, this graph is another indication that Stata's graphing capabilities are much stronger than many R users (and perhaps even Stata users) realize. Here's the graph: