Generic X-Y Plotting
Description
Generic function for plotting of R objects.
For simple scatter plots, plot.default will be used.
However, there are plot methods for many R objects,
including function s, data.frame s,
density objects, etc. Use methods(plot) and
the documentation for these. Most of these methods are implemented
using traditional graphics (the graphics package), but this is
not mandatory.
For more details about graphical parameter arguments used by
traditional graphics, see par .
Usage
plot(x, y, ...)
Arguments
x
the coordinates of points in the plot. Alternatively, a
single plotting structure, function or any R object with a
plot method can be provided.
y
the y coordinates of points in the plot, optional
if x is an appropriate structure.
...
arguments to be passed to methods, such as
graphical parameters (see par ).
Many methods will accept the following arguments:
typewhat type of plot should be drawn. Possible types are
-
"p"for points, -
"l"for lines, -
"b"for both, -
"c"for the lines part alone of"b", -
"o"for both ‘overplotted’, -
"h"for ‘histogram’ like (or ‘high-density’) vertical lines, -
"s"for stair steps, -
"S"for other steps, see ‘Details’ below, -
"n"for no plotting.
All other
types give a warning or an error; using, e.g.,type = "punkte"being equivalent totype = "p"for S compatibility. Note that some methods, e.g.plot.factor, do not accept this.-
mainan overall title for the plot: see
title.suba subtitle for the plot: see
title.xlaba title for the x axis: see
title.ylaba title for the y axis: see
title.aspthe
y/xaspect ratio, seeplot.window.
Details
The two step types differ in their x-y preference: Going from
(x1,y1) to (x2,y2) with x1 < x2, type = "s"
moves first horizontal, then vertical, whereas type = "S" moves
the other way around.
Note
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.
See Also
plot.default , plot.formula and other
methods; points , lines , par .
For thousands of points, consider using smoothScatter()
instead of plot().
For X-Y-Z plotting see contour , persp and
image .
Examples
require(stats) # for lowess, rpois, rnorm
require(graphics) # for plot methods
plot(cars)
lines(lowess(cars))
plot(sin, -pi, 2*pi) # see ?plot.function
## Discrete Distribution Plot:
plot(table(rpois(100, 5)), type = "h", col = "red", lwd = 10,
main = "rpois(100, lambda = 5)")
## Simple quantiles/ECDF, see ecdf() {library(stats)} for a better one:
plot(x <- sort(rnorm(47)), type = "s", main = "plot(x, type = \"s\")")
points(x, cex = .5, col = "dark red")