Scatterplots can get very hard to interpret when displaying large datasets, as points inevitably overplot and can???t be individually discerned.
Binning can be though of as a two-dimensional histogram, where shades of the bins take the place of the heights of the bars. This technique is computed in the hexbin package.
This example has been published by Myles Harrison on R-bloggers.
# Packages
library(hexbin)
library(RColorBrewer)
# Create data
x <- rnorm(mean=1.5, 5000)
y <- rnorm(mean=1.6, 5000)
# Make the plot
bin<-hexbin(x, y, xbins=40)
my_colors=colorRampPalette(rev(brewer.pal(11,'Spectral')))
plot(bin, main="" , colramp=my_colors , legend=F ) 
