[R] help on plots

[Marc Schwartz (via MN)]

On Thu, 2006-09-28 at 23:55 +0800, zhijie zhang wrote:
> Dear friends,
>  I met a problem on plotting.
> My dataset is :
> year    MHBC LHBC MHRC LURC
> 1993   11.75   4.50   0.43   0.46
> 1994    7.25   1.25   0.35   0.51
> 1995    8.67   2.17   0.54   0.44
> 1996   2.67   1.33   0.78   0.47
> 1997   3.42   4.92   0.69   0.48
> 1998   1.92   3.08   0.72   0.54
> 1999   2.33   2.58   0.74   0.41
> 2000   5.75   4.50   0.45   0.50
> 2001   3.75   4.42   0.52   0.47
> 2002   2.33   1.83   0.58   0.45
> 2003   0.25   2.83   0.50   0.39
> I want to get a plot -line with scatters, the requirement is :
> x-axis is year;
> two y-axis:
>   y1 corresponds to MHBC and LHBC;
>   y2 corresponds to MHRC and LURC;
> hope to use different symbols to differentiate the MHBC,LHBC,MHRC and  LURC.
> 
> The following is my program, but  very bad ,:
> *plot(a$year,a$MHBC,type='b')  #line1
> par(new=T)
> plot(a$year,a$LHBC,type='b')  #line2
> par(new=T)
> plot(a$year,a$MHRC,type='b')  #line3
> par(new=T)
> plot(a$year,a$LURC,type='b')   #line4
> axis(4, at=pretty(range(a$MHRC)))*
> In the figure, the labels and scales of X-axis are vague, the scale of
> y-axis is not very good.
> The better figure should be like the line1 and 2 are in the upper, and line3
> and 4 are in the bottom.
> Any suggestion are welcome!

It's not entirely clear to me what you want, so let me offer three
possibilities.


1. Do all four lines in a single plot with a common y axis:

matplot(a$year, a[, -1], type = "o", pch = 15:18)



2. Do all four lines in a single plot with the first two having a
separate left hand y axis and the second two having a separate right
hand y axis:

# Draw the first pair of lines
matplot(a$year, a[, 2:3], type = "o", pch = c(19, 20),
        lty = "solid", ann = FALSE)

# Get the current plot region boundaries
usr <- par("usr")

# Get the range of the second set of columns
range.y2 <- range(a[, 4:5])

# Change the plot region y axis range for the second
# set of columns. Extend them by 4% as per the default
par(usr = c(usr[1], usr[2], 
            range.y2[1] * 0.96 , range.y2[2] * 1.04))

# Add the second pair of lines
matlines(a$year, a[, 4:5], type = "o", pch = c(15, 18), 
         lty = "dashed", col = c("blue", "green"))

# Add the second y axis
axis(4)



3. Do the first two lines in an upper plot and the second two lines in a
lower plot, each has its own y axis range:

# Set plot region to have two rows
par(mfrow = c(2, 1))

# Adjust the plot margins
par(mar = c(2, 5, 2, 2))

# Draw the first pair of lines
matplot(a$year, a[, 2:3], type = "o", pch = c(19, 20),
        lty = "solid", ylab = "First Pair")


par(mar = c(3, 5, 2, 2))

# Add the second pair of lines
matplot(a$year, a[, 4:5], type = "o", pch = c(15, 18), 
        lty = "dashed", col = c("blue", "green"), 
        ylab = "Second Pair")



See ?matplot, ?par and ?points for more information.

HTH,

Marc Schwartz