A bar plot can often be confused with histograms (studied later in this chapter). Histograms are used to study the distribution of data whereas bar plots are used to study categorical data. Both the plots may look similar to the naked eye but the main difference is that the width of a bar plot is not of significance, whereas in histograms the width of the bars signifies the frequency of data.
In this recipe, I have made use of the infant mortality rate in India. The data is made available by the Government of India. The main objective is to study the basics of a bar plot in R as shown in the following screenshot:
We start the recipe by importing our data in R using the read.csv() function. R will search for the data under the current directory, and hence we use the setwd() function to set our working directory:
setwd("D:/book/scatter_Area/chapter2")
data = read.csv("infant.csv", header = TRUE)Once we import the data, we would like to process the data by ordering...