Plots

R has an awesomely powerful function called plot(), which will try to cleverly produce an appropriate plot depending on the type of data it is given. For example,

plot(labike$type)

creates a bar plot (what's a bar plot?),

plot(labike$type, labike$ped_count_pm)

creates a box plot (what's a box plot?),

and

plot(labike$bike_count_pm, labike$ped_count_pm)

creates a scatter plot (what's a scatter plot?).

If you want more control over which type of plot you create, there are also specifically-named functions for each plot type, which will be discussed in subsequent sections.

To make barplots, use the barplot() command. This command is a little strange– it won’t take a variable as it is, first you need to sum up how many observations fall into each category with the table() command. You can put it all together like this,

barplot(table(cdc$gender))

barplot(table(cdc$gender, cdc$general_health))

For this bar plot, you might want a legend to tell you which part of the bar represents Males and which represents Females. If so, see Adding a legend.

To learn more about bar plots and how to interpret them, learn about bar plots.

Mosaic plots also take tables as arguments, but they create a different effect than a barplot,

mosaicplot(table(cdc$gender, cdc$eat_fruit))

Since these labels are hard to read, you might want to consider rotating them with las, as described in Rotating labels.

For more about mosaic plots and how to interpret them, learn about mosaic plots.

The command to make histograms is hist(),

hist(cdc$weight)

For more about histograms and how to interpret them, learn about histograms.

To make boxplots, use boxplot(),

boxplot(cdc$weight)

boxplot(cdc$weight ~ cdc$gender)

For more about box plots and how to interpret them, learn about box plots.

Sometimes you want to add a line to a plot, maybe to delineate where the mean is. The abline() command allows you to do this.

hist(cdc$weight)
abline(v = mean(cdc$weight, na.rm = TRUE), col = "red")

Remember that for the cdc data, we need to specify na.rm=TRUE in the mean() function.

R allows you control over every aspect of your plot, you just need to know how to change things!

Almost every plot allows you to specify x- and y-axis labels, so they are easier to read than the R defaults. To do this, use the parameters xlab and ylab

plot(labike$bike_count_pm, labike$ped_count_pm, xlab = "Number of Bikes", ylab = "Number of pedestrians")

You can also add a title to your plot by using the parameter main,

plot(labike$bike_count_pm, labike$ped_count_pm, main = "Relationship between walkers and bikers")

To change colors, just use the parameter col, as in

plot(labike$bike_count_pm, labike$ped_count_pm, col = "blue")

If you want to get more specific than a word describing a color, you can also pass it hex values, like

plot(labike$bike_count_pm, labike$ped_count_pm, col = "#f492a9")

You can change the color of any plot using col

plot(labike$type, col="purple")

Or, if you want, you can give R a series of colors to use in a plot using a vector

plot(labike$type, col=c("purple", "green"))

If you’re making a scatterplot, you can change the symbols that are plotted at each point by using the parameter pch. There are 19 possible symbols, and they are numbered from 0 to 18. Try some of them out! The default is often 20, but there are lots of fun ones,

plot(labike$bike_count_pm, labike$ped_count_pm, pch = 11)

If you want to make plot symbols larger or smaller, you can use the parameter cex. This parameter tells R how much to scale the points up (or down). For example, cex=2 would make the points twice as large, and cex=0.5 would make them half as small.

Sometimes, it’s useful to rotate the labels on something. To do so, use the parameter las. If you use las=2, all the labels will be parallel to the axes.

mosaicplot(table(cdc$gender, cdc$eat_fruit), las = 2)

You can also try las= 0, 1, or 3. To see the R documentation for las, see

help(par)

To add a legend to your plot, use the parameter legend=TRUE.

barplot(table(cdc$gender, cdc$general_health), legend=TRUE)

There are many, many more things that can be specified about plot options. To learn more about them, check out the documentation for par(), the set of graphical parameters.

help(par)

The plots pane allows you to Export plots, that is, to save them as image files for use in PowerPoint presentations or Scratch projects. To do this, just click on the “Export” button at the top of the pane and select “Save Plot as Image” A popup will appear, You can choose the filetype you want (the default is png, but you can choose jpg, tiff, bmp, or several others) and name your plot (the default is Rplot, not very descriptive!). Then, click “Save.”

This is also the place to adjust the aspect ratio of your plot if it's too skinny, wide, tall or short. Reasons to do this include if all your plot labels aren't showing, or if you want all the plots in your PowerPoint presentation to be a consistent shape. To change the aspect ratio, just adjust one or both of the aspect ratio numbers and click “Update Preview” to see your changes: