Plotting of very large data sets in R

Question

How can I plot a very large data set in R?

I'd like to use a boxplot, or violin plot, or similar. All the data cannot be fit in memory. Can I incrementally read in and calculate the summaries needed to make these plots? If so how?

Answer 1

In supplement to my comment to Dmitri answer, a function to calculate quantiles using ff big-data handling package:

ffquantile<-function(ffv,qs=c(0,0.25,0.5,0.75,1),...){  stopifnot(all(qs<=1 & qs>=0))  ffsort(ffv,...)->ffvs  j<-(qs*(length(ffv)-1))+1  jf<-floor(j);ceiling(j)->jc  rowSums(matrix(ffvs[c(jf,jc)],length(qs),2))/2 } 

This is an exact algorithm, so it uses sorting -- and thus may take a lot of time.