I had a friend the other day ask me about modifying the plot that goes with R’s boxCox function. In particular they had multiple plots, and wanted to make the Y axes consistent between the different dependent variables. So for a typical R base plot call, you can specify ylim = c(whatever_low, whatever_high), but if you look at function in the end it does not let you do this yourself (it fixes ylim based on the log-likelihood range.

library(car)
data(trees)
# Making a second Y variable for illustration later
trees$V2 <- trees$Volume*2 + 3*rnorm(nrow(trees))

# Original function, https://rdrr.io/rforge/car/man/boxCox.html
orig_output <- with(trees, boxCox(Volume ~ log(Height) + log(Girth), data = trees))

So if we look at the orig_output object, it gives us the x and y values for the above plot, but it does not give us the dashed line locations in the plot.

Typically here I would type out boxCox without the parenthesis at the prompt to get the function definition. That does not quite work here, as it is unhelpful and just gets us the message useMethod(boxCox). From here we can do the function method(boxCox) to help slightly more – we can see that the boxCox function really has 3 different functions, that depend on the original input.

Here we are specifying the formula interface to the function call, so lets look at getAnywhere(boxCox.formula):

Well, that is not very helpful, lets look at getAnywhere(boxCox.default) instead:

Ok, that is what we are going for. If you look into the function, at the very end you will see how it draws those dashed reference lines (anything drawn with lty = 2 in the code).

So what is happening here is that the different boxCox function calls are all daisy chained together, and it goes from formula -> lm object -> the original boxCox function. Now that we can see the function, we can make some small changes to have it return the locations of the vertical/horizontal reference lines that we want (or we could change it to accept a ylim argument directly). I name this new function boxCox.new.

# Modifying the function to return all the info you need
boxCox.new <- function(object, lambda = seq(-2, 2, 1/10), plotit = TRUE, interp = plotit, 
    eps = 1/50, xlab = NULL, ylab = NULL, family = "bcPower", 
    param = c("lambda", "gamma"), gamma = NULL, grid = TRUE, 
    ...) 
{
    if (class(object)[1] == "mlm") 
        stop("This function is for univariate response only")
    param <- match.arg(param)
    ylab <- if (is.null(ylab)) {
        if (family != "bcnPower") 
            "log-likelihood"
        else {
            if (param == "gamma") {
                expression(max(logL[gamma](lambda, gamma)))
            }
            else {
                expression(max[lambda](logL(lambda, gamma)))
            }
        }
    }
    else ylab
    xlab <- if (is.null(xlab)) {
        if (param == "lambda") 
            expression(lambda)
        else expression(gamma)
    }
    else xlab
    #fam <- matchFun(family) #Needed to change this to base function
    fam <- match.fun(family)
    if (is.null(object$y) || is.null(object$qr)) 
        stop(paste(deparse(substitute(object)), "does not have both 'qr' and 'y' components"))
    y <- object$y
    n <- length(y)
    xqr <- object$qr
    xl <- loglik <- if (family != "bcnPower") 
        as.vector(lambda)
    else {
        if (param == "lambda") 
            as.vector(lambda)
        else {
            if (!is.null(gamma)) 
                as.vector(gamma)
            else {
                p1 <- powerTransform(object, family = "bcnPower")
                gam <- p1$gamma
                se <- sd(y)
                seq(max(0.01, gam - 3 * se), gam + 3 * se, length = 100)
            }
        }
    }
    m <- length(xl)
    if (family != "bcnPower") {
        for (i in 1L:m) {
            yt <- fam(y, xl[i], j = TRUE)
            loglik[i] <- -n/2 * log(sum(qr.resid(xqr, yt)^2))
        }
    }
    else {
        lambda.1d <- function(gamma) {
            fn <- function(lam) bcnPowerllik(NULL, y, NULL, lambda = lam, 
                gamma = gamma, xqr = xqr)$llik
            f <- optimize(f = fn, interval = c(-3, 3), maximum = TRUE)
            f$objective
        }
        gamma.1d <- function(lambda) {
            fn <- function(gam) bcnPowerllik(NULL, y, NULL, lambda = lambda, 
                gamma = gam, xqr = xqr)$llik
            f <- optimize(f = fn, interval = c(0.01, max(y)), 
                maximum = TRUE)
            f$objective
        }
        for (i in 1L:m) {
            loglik[i] <- if (param == "lambda") 
                gamma.1d(loglik[i])
            else lambda.1d(loglik[i])
        }
    }
    if (interp) {
        sp <- spline(xl, loglik, n = 100)
        xl <- sp$x
        loglik <- sp$y
        m <- length(xl)
    }
    if (plotit) {
        mx <- (1L:m)[loglik == max(loglik)][1L]
        Lmax <- loglik[mx]
        lim <- Lmax - qchisq(19/20, 1)/2
        # Adding in vector to contain x functions location and top line
        xF <- c()
        xT <- c()
        plot(xl, loglik, xlab = xlab, ylab = ylab, type = "n", 
            ylim = range(loglik, lim))
        if (grid) {
            grid(lty = 1, equilogs = FALSE)
            box()
        }
        lines(xl, loglik)
        plims <- par("usr")
        abline(h = lim, lty = 2)
        y0 <- plims[3L]
        scal <- (1/10 * (plims[4L] - y0))/par("pin")[2L]
        scx <- (1/10 * (plims[2L] - plims[1L]))/par("pin")[1L]
        text(xl[1L] + scx, lim + scal, " 95%")
        la <- xl[mx]
        if (mx > 1 && mx < m) 
            segments(la, y0, la, Lmax, lty = 2)
            xF <- c(xF, la)
            xT <- c(xT, Lmax)
        ind <- range((1L:m)[loglik > lim])
        if (loglik[1L] < lim) {
            i <- ind[1L]
            x <- xl[i - 1] + ((lim - loglik[i - 1]) * (xl[i] - 
                xl[i - 1]))/(loglik[i] - loglik[i - 1])
            segments(x, y0, x, lim, lty = 2)
            xF <- c(xF, x)
            xT <- c(xT, lim)
        }
        if (loglik[m] < lim) {
            i <- ind[2L] + 1
            x <- xl[i - 1] + ((lim - loglik[i - 1]) * (xl[i] - 
                xl[i - 1]))/(loglik[i] - loglik[i - 1])
            segments(x, y0, x, lim, lty = 2)
            xF <- c(xF, x)
            xT <- c(xT, lim)
        }
    # See definitions of hline, vlines, vtop, ybase, just returning that info
    return(list(x = xl, y = loglik, hline = lim, vlines = xF, vtop = xT, ybase = y0))
    }
    list(x = xl, y = loglik)
}

But this won’t work offhand with just calling boxCox.new with our same prior function calls, so we need to just entirely replace the original boxCox.default function for our daisy chain of function references to work. Here can use the assignInNamespace function to effectively overwrite the original.

# Need to do this to get it to work with lm objects
assignInNamespace("boxCox.default",boxCox.new,ns="car")

r1 <- with(trees, boxCox(Volume ~ log(Height) + log(Girth), data = trees))
r2 <- with(trees, boxCox(V2 ~ log(Height) + log(Girth), data = trees))

And now if we inspect either r1 or r2 you can see it returns the info we want.

And now we build own our set of plots. I don’t have the nice text annotations (or the default grid lines), but leave that to the reader to do that extra work.

par(mfrow=c(2,1), mai = c(1, 1, 0.2, 1))
plot(r1$x,r1$y,ylim=c(-160,-70), type='l', xaxp = c(-160,-70, 8),
     xlab=expression(lambda),ylab='log-Likelihood')
# You need to specify the bottom of the segment to match your limit
abline(h = r1$hline, lty = 2)
segments(r1$vlines, -160, r1$vlines, r1$vtop, lty = 2)
plot(r2$x, r2$y,ylim=c(-160,-70), type='l', xaxp = c(-160,-70, 8),
     xlab=expression(lambda),ylab='log-Likelihood')
segments(r2$vlines, -160, r2$vlines, r2$vtop, lty = 2)
abline(h = r2$hline, lty = 2)

I have done this previously for default plots in base R that I wanted to make myself in ggplot, which you could do here as well and do a facetted plot instead of the par deal with multiple rows (ggplot takes care of the spacing a bit nicer). But that is too much work for this quick tip to cajole those different data frames to do the facets for ggplot.