Density heat map in R

5 Ways to Do 2D Histograms in R

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One option is to use densCols() to extract kernel densities at each point. Mapping those densities to the desired color ramp, and plotting points in order of increasing local density gets you a plot much like those in the linked article.

## Data in a data.frame
x1 <- rnorm(n=1E3, sd=2)
x2 <- x1*1.2 + rnorm(n=1E3, sd=2)
df <- data.frame(x1,x2)

## Use densCols() output to get density at each point
x <- densCols(x1,x2, colramp=colorRampPalette(c("black", "white")))
df$dens <- col2rgb(x)[1,] + 1L

## Map densities to colors
cols <-  colorRampPalette(c("#000099", "#00FEFF", "#45FE4F", 
                            "#FCFF00", "#FF9400", "#FF3100"))(256)
df$col <- cols[df$dens]

## Plot it, reordering rows so that densest points are plotted on top
plot(x2~x1, data=df[order(df$dens),], pch=20, col=col, cex=2)

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edited Jun 13 at 22:18

answered Jun 13 at 20:40 Josh O'Brien 54k357127