[R] New to R - Errors in plotting

Erik Iverson iverson at biostat.wisc.edu
Thu Nov 6 17:29:48 CET 2008


Hello -

In you example, what are the classes of x and y?

  x<-1:4
  y<-5:8
  plot(x,y)

class(x)
class(y)

In your 'real' data, what are the classes of A and B

class(A)
class(B)

One may be a factor?

How are you reading your data into R, read.table?  Make sure your data 
are numeric, then plot them, and it should do what you'd like.

Since you're new to R, one of my tips would be to learn the class() and 
str() functions.  Many functions, such as plot, operate differently 
depending on the class of data given to them, therefore it's very 
important to know the classes of your data objects.


BKMooney wrote:
> I am new to R and am running into trouble with the function plot.  
> 
> When I enter in the simple code: 
> x<-1:4
> y<-5:8
> plot(x,y)
> 
> I get a scatter plot with 4 points as expected.  
> 
> However, with my own data, A and B are both vectors of length ~85, each
> entry a decimal in [0,1].  
> 
> Using the same plot(A,B) with this data, the plot function no longer gives
> me a simple plot with 85 points.  Instead there are many points, and what
> looks to be several box&whisker plots also included on the plot.  
> 
> This is a link to the actual output.  
> http://www.nabble.com/file/p20364310/plotAB.bmp plotAB.bmp 
> 
> Why is the plot function doing this?  How can I get it to simply give me a
> scatterplot?  (From there I want to do a lsline, etc..)
> 
> Any help is greatly appreciated...
> 
> Thanks!



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