DATA MINING Desktop Survival Guide by Graham Williams
Desktop Survival Project Home List of Figures List of Tables Data Mining with Rattle Introduction Data Mining with Rattle Data Exploring Data Transforming Data Cluster Analysis Association Analysis Classification and Regression Models Evaluation and Deployment Issues Moving into R Troubleshooting R for the Data Miner R Data Graphics in R Understanding Data Preparing Data Descriptive and Predictive Analytics Issues Evaluating Models Reporting Cluster Analysis Text Mining Text Mining Algorithms Bagging Bayes Classifier Cluster Analysis Conditional Trees Hierarchical Clustering K-Nearest Neighbours Linear Models Neural Networks Support Vector Machines Open Products AlphaMiner Borgelt Data Mining Suite KNime R Rattle Weka Closed Products C4.5 Clementine Equbits Foresight GhostMiner InductionEngine ODM Enterprise Miner Statistica Data Miner TreeNet Virtual Predict Appendicies Installing GTK, R, and Rattle Glossary Bibliography Index

Interacting with Plots

Figure 2.5: A sample of plots

Rattle uses the Cairo device for displaying graphic plots. If the Cairo device is not available within your installation then Rattle resorts to the default window device for the operating system (x11 for GNU/Linux and window for MS/Windows). The Settings menu also allows control of the choice of graphics device (allowing us to use the default, which is x11 for GNU/Linux and windows for MS/Windows). The Cairo device has a number of advantages, one being that the device can be encapsulated within other windows, as is done with Rattle, to provide various operating system independent functionality, and a common interface. If we choose not to use the Cairo device, we will have the default devices, and they work just fine.

At the bottom of the window that embeds the Cairo device we see a series of buttons that allow us to Save the plot to file, to Copy the plot to the clipboard to allow it to be pasted into other applications (e.g., OpenOffice), to Print the plot, and to Close the plot.

The Save button of the plot window (on the Cairo device) allows you to save the graphics to a file in one of the supported formats. The supported formats include pdf, png (good for vector images and text), jpg (good for colourful images), svg (for general scalable vector graphics), and, on MS/Windows, wmf (for MS/Windows specific vector graphics). A popup will request the filename to save to. The default is to save as PDF format, saving to a file with the filename extension of .png. You can choose to save in the other formats simply by specifying the appropriate filename extension.

The Copy button will save a copy of the plot into the clipboard. This will allow the image to be directly pasted into other applications. Typically we might create a report using OpenOffice writer, and this option can be used to include graphics from the exploration and modelling of our data. The image is captured as a PNG image, and thus as a bitmap image rather than a vector graphics. Generally the resolution will be quite adequate, but it is not scalable.

The Print button will send the plot off to a printer. This requires the underlying R application to have been set up properly to access the required printer.

Finally, once we are finished with the plot we can click the Close button to shut down that particular plot window.

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