barplot as histogram

Perhaps

plot(xs, ys, type = "h", lwd = 3)

will work?

I'm not sure that a direct call to hist(, plot = F) will get around
the data problems. If you type getAnywhere(hist.default) you can see
the code that runs hist(): perhaps you can extract the working bits
you need.

Michael

On Fri, Nov 4, 2011 at 2:04 PM, Jesse Brown <jesse.r.brown at lmco.com> wrote:
  

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