title: Plotting a fold-change scale in R
body: <p>I have data which for every point takes values ranging from 2000 to -2000.</p>
  
  <p>Normally, the trivial fix is simply plotting the log of the data. However, here I have both positive and negative values, and I'm not sure how to scale the data. </p>
  
  <p>For example, I have data that looks like:</p>
  
  <pre><code>x = c(5 ,-2, -3, -10, -15, -2000)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Simply plotting using boxplot(x) yields an unscaled, difficult to read boxplot:</p>
  
  <p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/E7TFd.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/E7TFd.png" alt="Unscaled, difficult to read boxplot"></a></p>
  
  <p>I found <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6897243/labelling-logarithmic-scale-display-in-r#6897666">this answer</a>, which lets me relabel the axis to what I want, but doesn't actually incorporate the data to plot it. What I'm looking for is something like:</p>
  
  <pre><code>labels=expression(1, -1, -10, -100, -1000)
  boxplot(boxplot(c(10,10,10,10,-1,-1.5,-3,-1), yaxt="n"))
  </code></pre>
  
  <p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/ieGjy.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/ieGjy.png" alt="Something that looks like what I want"></a></p>
  
  <p>As you can see, the axis are labeled by fold (e.g. 10, 1, -1, -10, -100). However, in order to actually plot something, I cant use those labels, as all I did was rename the labels. All the other alternatives I've seen (e.g. <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46017792/applying-log-scale-to-y-axis-for-visualizing-proportions-with-ggplot2">This one</a>, <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11053899/how-to-get-a-reversed-log10-scale-in-ggplot2">or this one</a>) simply add log="y" to the plot argument, which doesn't work for my negative data.</p>
  
  <p>Basically, I can't figure out how to coerce R into plotting with axis labels like 10, 1, -1, -10, -100 and being able to plot points with that same numerical value. </p>