R is a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics and is provided with excellent graphics and plotting capabilities. Lately I’ve been playing with R to get used at creating simple visualizations and charts, as a first step to get a quick overview when using a the dataset.

R is really powerful and with a few lines of code you can get the work done. Here I will explain how to make a thematic map (also known as choropleth map) as well as some basic charts. Here you can see the final result:

Which is the best way to visualize effectively a train timetable? Well probably there is a lot of ways to visualize this kind of data, and one of them is using the stem-and-leaf plot (called also stemplot). Using this technique the amount of data to display (hours and minutes) can be reduced.

Why are the stem-and-leaf plots useful in that case? This kind of plot is a method for showing the frequency with which certain classes of values occur. You could achieve the same by making a frequency distribution table or a histogram for the values, or you can use a stem-and-leaf plot and let the numbers themselves to show pretty much the same information.