[R] New to R - Errors in plotting

Duncan Murdoch murdoch at stats.uwo.ca
Thu Nov 6 17:34:06 CET 2008


On 06/11/2008 11:18 AM, 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...

Most likely your A vector is not numeric:  it's being read as strings 
like "0.4688", etc.  Take a look at str(A) and str(B) to see their 
structure.  (I can't tell from the plot, but I'd guess it's being read 
as a factor, because some of the values are not recognized as numeric.)

Duncan Murdoch



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