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I'm struggling getting a greater than sign (>=) into a forestplot. The expression should embedded in some kind of matrix. This should be simple and straight forward but I just can't find the right formula, here's my debug code:

library(rmeta)
row_names <- matrix(list("variable a", expression(test >= 2)))
test_data <- data.frame(coef=c(1.59, 1.24),
                        low=c(1.3, 0.99),
                        high=c(1.94, 1.55))
forestplot(row_names, test_data$coef, test_data$low, test_data$high, zero = 1)
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  • $\begingroup$ You can't pass an expression inside a matrix. Not sure how to get around this though. $\endgroup$
    – Ari B. Friedman
    Commented Aug 16, 2011 at 19:41
  • $\begingroup$ This might be better for StackOverflow, given that this is deeper into R than into statistics, and some of the especially talented R folks may be more likely to see it there than here. $\endgroup$
    – Iterator
    Commented Aug 16, 2011 at 23:47
  • $\begingroup$ Your probably right, my rewrite of the forestplot works well enough for my needs at the moment. I haven't been able to find any good documentation concerning expression objects. I'm also amazed how the R community allows so much uncommented code, this would have been a lot easier if Thomas Lumley had added some comments to the original code (he's far from alone) $\endgroup$
    – Max Gordon
    Commented Aug 17, 2011 at 6:36
  • $\begingroup$ Maybe your update could be posted as an answer? $\endgroup$
    – Andre Silva
    Commented Nov 10, 2013 at 18:27
  • $\begingroup$ @AndreSilva: Thank you, I had forgotten about this question. I've written an answer and a blog post, see below. There have been some updates since the previous post and I therefore removed the original code. $\endgroup$
    – Max Gordon
    Commented Dec 8, 2013 at 15:57

1 Answer 1

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I've created a forestplot function that can handle complex labels and other. It is included in my package Gmisc and you can find a tutorial to the forestplot2 function here.

To generate the plot from my original question all you need to do is load the package and run this code:

library(Gmisc)

row_names <- list(list("Variable = 1", expression(Variable >= 2)))
test_data <- data.frame(coef=c(1.59, 1.24),
                        low=c(1.3, 0.74),
                        high=c(1.94, 1.74))
forestplot2(labeltext=row_names, 
            mean=test_data$coef, 
            lower=test_data$low, 
            upper=test_data$high, 
            zero = 1,
            col=fpColors(line="darkblue", box="royalblue"),
            new_page=TRUE)

This gives the following plot:

Forestplot demo

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