PlotECDF: Empirical Cumulative Distribution Function

In DescTools: Tools for Descriptive Statistics

Empirical Cumulative Distribution Function

Description

Faster alternative for plotting the empirical cumulative distribution function (ecdf). The function offers the option to construct the ecdf on the base of a histogram, which makes sense, when x is large. So the plot process is much faster, without loosing much precision in the details.

Usage

PlotECDF(x, breaks = NULL, col = Pal()[1], ylab = "", 
         lwd = 2, xlab = NULL, ...)

Arguments

x	numeric vector of the observations for ecdf.
breaks	will be passed directly to hist. If left to NULL, no histogram will be used.
col	color of the line.
ylab	label for the y-axis.
lwd	line width.
xlab	label for the x-axis.
...	arguments to be passed to subsequent functions.

Details

The stats function plot.ecdf is fine for vectors that are not too large. However for n ~ 1e7 we would observe a dramatic performance breakdown (possibly in combination with the use of do.call).

PlotECDF is designed as alternative for quicker plotting the ecdf for larger vectors. If breaks are provided as argument, a histogram with that number of breaks will be calculated and the ecdf will use those frequencies instead of respecting every single point.
Note that a plot will rarely need more than ~1'000 points on x to have a sufficient resolution on usual terms. PlotFdist will also use this number of breaks by default.

Value

no value returned, use plot.ecdf if any results are required.

Author(s)

Andri Signorell <[e-mail]>

See Also

plot.ecdf, PlotFdist

Examples

PlotECDF(d.pizza$temperature)

# make large vector
x <- rnorm(n=1e7)

# plot only 1000 points instead of 1e7
PlotECDF(x, breaks=1000)

DescTools documentation built on April 4, 2025, 1:55 a.m.