Calculating the area of a confidence ellipse in a certain region of space

Question

I was wondering if someone had an idea on how to calculate the blue shaded area inside my confidence ellipse. Any suggestions or places to look are greatly appreciated. Also, I am hoping to find a general formula since the ellipse does not necessarily have to lie in that region in application (i.e., the ellipse could have been bigger). Here is my code for my picture if it helps:

library(car)

x = c(7,4,1)
y = c(4,6,7)

plot(x,y,xlim=c(0,10),ylim=c(0,10))
rect(x,y,max(x)+100000,max(y)+100000,col="lightblue",border=NA)
points(x,y,col="red",pch=19)

ellipse(center=c(3.5,5),shape=matrix(c(1,.5,.5,2),nrow=2),radius=3,col="green")

Answer 1

If you can convert the ellipse and the blue area to SpatialPolygons objects, then it's a cinch, using functions from the rgeos package, to calculate their area, the area of their intersection, and all other sorts of interesting quantities.

Unfortunately, getting the objects in the proper form requires a bit of heavy lifting:

library(car)
library(sp)
library(rgeos)

## Function for creating a SpatialPolygons object from data.frame of coords
xy2SP <- function(xy, ID=NULL) {
    if(is.null(ID)) ID <- sample(1e12, size=1)
    SpatialPolygons(list(Polygons(list(Polygon(xy)), ID=ID)),
                    proj4string=CRS("+proj=merc"))
}

## Ellipse coordinates
plot.new()  # Needed by ellipse() 
ell <- ellipse(center=c(3.5,5),shape=matrix(c(1,.5,.5,2),nrow=2),radius=3)
dev.off()   # Cleaning up after plot.new()

## Three rectangles' coordinates in a length-3 list
x <- c(7,4,1)
y <- c(4,6,7)
mx <- max(x) + 1e6
my <- max(y) + 1e6
rr <- lapply(1:3, function(i) {
    data.frame(x = c(x[i], x[i], mx, mx, x[i]),
               y = c(y[i], my, my, y[i], y[i]))
})


## Make two SpatialPolygons objects from ellipse and merged rectangles
ell <- xy2SP(ell)
rrr <- gUnionCascaded(do.call(rbind, lapply(rr, xy2SP)))

## Find area of their intersection
gArea(gIntersection(ell, rrr))
# [1] 10.36296