The Default Scatterplot Function

Description

Draw a scatter plot with decorations such as axes and titles in the active graphics window.

Usage

## Default S3 method:
plot(x, y = NULL, type = "p",  xlim = NULL, ylim = NULL,
     log = "", main = NULL, sub = NULL, xlab = NULL, ylab = NULL,
     ann = par("ann"), axes = TRUE, frame.plot = axes,
     panel.first = NULL, panel.last = NULL, asp = NA,
     xgap.axis = NA, ygap.axis = NA,
     ...)

Arguments

Details

Commonly used graphical parameters are:

col

The colors for lines and points. Multiple colors can be specified so that each point can be given its own color. If there are fewer colors than points they are recycled in the standard fashion. Lines will all be plotted in the first colour specified.

bg

a vector of background colors for open plot symbols, see points. Note: this is not the same setting as par("bg").

pch

a vector of plotting characters or symbols: see points.

cex

a numerical vector giving the amount by which plotting characters and symbols should be scaled relative to the default. This works as a multiple of par("cex"). NULL and NA are equivalent to 1.0. Note that this does not affect annotation: see below.

lty

a vector of line types, see par.

cex.main, col.lab, font.sub, etc

settings for main- and sub-title and axis annotation, see title and par.

lwd

a vector of line widths, see par.

Note

The presence of panel.first and panel.last is a historical anomaly: default plots do not have ‘panels’, unlike e.g. pairs plots. For more control, use lower-level plotting functions: plot.default calls in turn some of plot.new, plot.window, plot.xy, axis, box and title, and plots can be built up by calling these individually, or by calling plot(type = "n") and adding further elements.

The plot generic was moved from the graphics package to the base package in R 4.0.0. It is currently re-exported from the graphics namespace to allow packages importing it from there to continue working, but this may change in future versions of R.

References

Becker, R. A., Chambers, J. M. and Wilks, A. R. (1988) The New S Language. Wadsworth & Brooks/Cole.

Cleveland, W. S. (1985) The Elements of Graphing Data. Monterey, CA: Wadsworth.

Murrell, P. (2005) R Graphics. Chapman & Hall/CRC Press.

See Also

plot, plot.window, xy.coords. For thousands of points, consider using smoothScatter instead.

Examples

Speed <- cars$speed
Distance <- cars$dist
plot(Speed, Distance, panel.first = grid(8, 8),
     pch = 0, cex = 1.2, col = "blue")
plot(Speed, Distance,
     panel.first = lines(stats::lowess(Speed, Distance), lty = "dashed"),
     pch = 0, cex = 1.2, col = "blue")

## Show the different plot types
x <- 0:12
y <- sin(pi/5 * x)
op <- par(mfrow = c(3,3), mar = .1+ c(2,2,3,1))
for (tp in c("p","l","b",  "c","o","h",  "s","S","n")) {
   plot(y ~ x, type = tp, main = paste0("plot(*, type = \"", tp, "\")"))
   if(tp == "S") {
      lines(x, y, type = "s", col = "red", lty = 2)
      mtext("lines(*, type = \"s\", ...)", col = "red", cex = 0.8)
   }
}
par(op)

##--- Log-Log Plot  with  custom axes
lx <- seq(1, 5, length.out = 41)
yl <- expression(e^{-frac(1,2) * {log[10](x)}^2})
y <- exp(-.5*lx^2)
op <- par(mfrow = c(2,1), mar = par("mar")-c(1,0,2,0), mgp = c(2, .7, 0))
plot(10^lx, y, log = "xy", type = "l", col = "purple",
     main = "Log-Log plot", ylab = yl, xlab = "x")
plot(10^lx, y, log = "xy", type = "o", pch = ".", col = "forestgreen",
     main = "Log-Log plot with custom axes", ylab = yl, xlab = "x",
     axes = FALSE, frame.plot = TRUE)
my.at <- 10^(1:5)
axis(1, at = my.at, labels = formatC(my.at, format = "fg"))
e.y <- -5:-1 ; at.y <- 10^e.y
axis(2, at = at.y, col.axis = "red", las = 1,
     labels = as.expression(lapply(e.y, function(E) bquote(10^.(E)))))
par(op)