jitter ‘Jitter’ (Add Noise) to Numbers

Description

Add a small amount of noise to a numeric vector.

Usage

jitter(x, factor = 1, amount = NULL)

Arguments

x	numeric vector to which jitter should be added.
factor	numeric.
amount	numeric; if positive, used as amount (see below), otherwise, if = 0 the default is factor * z/50. Default (NULL): factor * d/5 where d is about the smallest difference between x values.

Details

The result, say r, is r <- x + runif(n, -a, a) where n <- length(x) and a is the amount argument (if specified).

Let z <- max(x) - min(x) (assuming the usual case). The amount a to be added is either provided as positive argument amount or otherwise computed from z, as follows:

If amount == 0, we set a <- factor * z/50 (same as S).

If amount is NULL (default), we set a <- factor * d/5 where d is the smallest difference between adjacent unique (apart from fuzz) x values.

Value

jitter(x, ...) returns a numeric of the same length as x, but with an amount of noise added in order to break ties.

Author(s)

Werner Stahel and Martin Maechler, ETH Zurich

References

Chambers, J. M., Cleveland, W. S., Kleiner, B. and Tukey, P.A. (1983) Graphical Methods for Data Analysis. Wadsworth; figures 2.8, 4.22, 5.4.

Chambers, J. M. and Hastie, T. J. (1992) Statistical Models in S. Wadsworth & Brooks/Cole.

See Also

rug which you may want to combine with jitter.

Examples

round(jitter(c(rep(1, 3), rep(1.2, 4), rep(3, 3))), 3)
## These two 'fail' with S-plus 3.x:
jitter(rep(0, 7))
jitter(rep(10000, 5))