Edgar Anderson's Iris Data

Description

This famous (Fisher's or Anderson's) iris data set gives the measurements in centimeters of the variables sepal length and width and petal length and width, respectively, for 50 flowers from each of 3 species of iris. The species are Iris setosa, versicolor, and virginica.

Usage

iris
iris3

Format

iris is a data frame with 150 cases (rows) and 5 variables (columns) named Sepal.Length, Sepal.Width, Petal.Length, Petal.Width, and Species.

iris3 gives the same data arranged as a 3-dimensional array of size 50 by 4 by 3, as once provided by S-PLUS. The first dimension gives the case number within the species subsample, the second the measurements with names Sepal L., Sepal W., Petal L., and Petal W., and the third the species.

Source

Fisher, R. A. (1936) The use of multiple measurements in taxonomic problems. Annals of Eugenics, 7, Part II, 179–188. doi:10.1111/j.1469-1809.1936.tb02137.x.

The data were collected by Anderson, Edgar (1935). The irises of the Gaspe Peninsula, Bulletin of the American Iris Society, 59, 2–5.

References

Becker, R. A., Chambers, J. M. and Wilks, A. R. (1988) The New S Language. Wadsworth & Brooks/Cole. (has iris3 as iris.)

See Also

matplot some examples of which use iris.

Examples

summary(iris)

## Fisher's (1936) research question: whether (compound measurements of)
## Iris versicolor "differs twice as much from I. setosa as from I. virginica"
pairs(iris[1:4], col = iris$Species)
legend(0.5, 1, levels(iris$Species), fill = 1:3, bty = "n",
       horiz = TRUE, xjust = 0.5, yjust = 0, xpd = TRUE)

## equivalence of legacy array (iris3) and data.frame (iris) representation
dni3 <- dimnames(iris3)
ii <- data.frame(matrix(aperm(iris3, c(1,3,2)), ncol = 4,
                        dimnames = list(NULL, sub(" L.",".Length",
                                        sub(" W.",".Width", dni3[[2]])))),
    Species = gl(3, 50, labels = sub("S", "s", sub("V", "v", dni3[[3]]))))
stopifnot(all.equal(ii, iris))