I am trying to generate a histogram in R, but some of the x labels are missing.
Here is the code I wrote:
> tmp <- hist(x, breaks=-3.5:(max(x)+1), xaxt="n", right=FALSE, xlab="log(MRS)",main="Pairwise Family-Health")
> axis(1, at=tmp$mids, labels=-3.5:max(x))
(The x values should be -3.5,-2.5,-1.5,-0.5, 0.5, 1.5, 2.5, 3.5, and the bars centering at these values.)
Does anyone know what the problem might be? Thanks!
In addition to the methods suggested in the comments (making the plot bigger, or making the text smaller), you may also want to look at the staxlab function in the plotrix package which automates a stacked label approach (puts the labels alternating on 2 or more lines to include more labels but still prevent overlap).
Try using the gap.axis argument within the axis function. So something like,
axis(side = 1, at = seq(-500000, 500000, by = 100000), gap.axis = 0.25)`
helped me when I had the same problem.
Related
I am creating a plot in R and I dont like the x axis values being plotted by R.
For example:
x <- seq(10,200,10)
y <- runif(x)
plot(x,y)
This plots a graph with the following values on the X axis:
50, 100, 150, 200
However, I want to plot the 20 values 10,20, 30 ... 200 stored in variable x, as the X axis values. I have scoured through countless blogs and the terse manual - after hours of searching, the closest I've come to finding anything useful is the following (summarized) instructions:
call plot() or par(), specifying argument xaxt='n'
call axis() e.g. axis(side = 1, at = seq(0, 10, by = 0.1), labels = FALSE, tcl = -0.2)
I tried it and the resulting plot had no x axis values at all. Is it possible that someone out there knows how to do this? I can't believe that no one has ever tried to do this before.
You'll find the answer to your question in the help page for ?axis.
Here is one of the help page examples, modified with your data:
Option 1: use xaxp to define the axis labels
plot(x,y, xaxt="n")
axis(1, xaxp=c(10, 200, 19), las=2)
Option 2: Use at and seq() to define the labels:
plot(x,y, xaxt="n")
axis(1, at = seq(10, 200, by = 10), las=2)
Both these options yield the same graphic:
PS. Since you have a large number of labels, you'll have to use additional arguments to get the text to fit in the plot. I use las to rotate the labels.
Take a closer look at the ?axis documentation. If you look at the description of the labels argument, you'll see that it is:
"a logical value specifying whether (numerical) annotations are
to be made at the tickmarks,"
So, just change it to true, and you'll get your tick labels.
x <- seq(10,200,10)
y <- runif(x)
plot(x,y,xaxt='n')
axis(side = 1, at = x,labels = T)
# Since TRUE is the default for labels, you can just use axis(side=1,at=x)
Be careful that if you don't stretch your window width, then R might not be able to write all your labels in. Play with the window width and you'll see what I mean.
It's too bad that you had such trouble finding documentation! What were your search terms? Try typing r axis into Google, and the first link you will get is that Quick R page that I mentioned earlier. Scroll down to "Axes", and you'll get a very nice little guide on how to do it. You should probably check there first for any plotting questions, it will be faster than waiting for a SO reply.
Hope this coding will helps you :)
plot(x,y,xaxt = 'n')
axis(side=1,at=c(1,20,30,50),labels=c("1975","1980","1985","1990"))
In case of plotting time series, the command ts.plot requires a different argument than xaxt="n"
require(graphics)
ts.plot(ldeaths, mdeaths, xlab="year", ylab="deaths", lty=c(1:2), gpars=list(xaxt="n"))
axis(1, at = seq(1974, 1980, by = 2))
I made a plot of the factor variable "answer" in subset A1. I want to decrease the text size on both axes, in order to fit in both extreme values on the x-axis. However, when using cex.axis, only the font size on the y-label is affected, not on the x-axis. Why is that, and how can I change that?
The function I used is:
plot(A1$answer, main = "Would you recommend edX to a friend of you?", xlab = "Answer", ylab = "#students", col='lightblue', cex.axis=0.75, font=3, family='mono'); box(col='lightblue');
And this is the output:
When you use plot on a factor variable x it calls barplot by default (or to be more precise barplot(table(x)), i.e you can look into ?barplot for hints. In this case, as I mentioned in the comments, the x-axis is considered as labels, not a numeric axis, therefore you need to use cex.names like so:
tab <- as.ordered(sample(1:10, 100, replace = TRUE))
plot(tab, cex.axis = 0.75, cex.names = 0.75)
Also, as hinted above, if you want to use barplot directly, you need to make a table first
barplot(table(tab), cex.axis = 0.75, cex.names = 0.2)
I just stumbled upon the barchart function in lattice, and this has a much better output:
I am creating a plot in R and I dont like the x axis values being plotted by R.
For example:
x <- seq(10,200,10)
y <- runif(x)
plot(x,y)
This plots a graph with the following values on the X axis:
50, 100, 150, 200
However, I want to plot the 20 values 10,20, 30 ... 200 stored in variable x, as the X axis values. I have scoured through countless blogs and the terse manual - after hours of searching, the closest I've come to finding anything useful is the following (summarized) instructions:
call plot() or par(), specifying argument xaxt='n'
call axis() e.g. axis(side = 1, at = seq(0, 10, by = 0.1), labels = FALSE, tcl = -0.2)
I tried it and the resulting plot had no x axis values at all. Is it possible that someone out there knows how to do this? I can't believe that no one has ever tried to do this before.
You'll find the answer to your question in the help page for ?axis.
Here is one of the help page examples, modified with your data:
Option 1: use xaxp to define the axis labels
plot(x,y, xaxt="n")
axis(1, xaxp=c(10, 200, 19), las=2)
Option 2: Use at and seq() to define the labels:
plot(x,y, xaxt="n")
axis(1, at = seq(10, 200, by = 10), las=2)
Both these options yield the same graphic:
PS. Since you have a large number of labels, you'll have to use additional arguments to get the text to fit in the plot. I use las to rotate the labels.
Take a closer look at the ?axis documentation. If you look at the description of the labels argument, you'll see that it is:
"a logical value specifying whether (numerical) annotations are
to be made at the tickmarks,"
So, just change it to true, and you'll get your tick labels.
x <- seq(10,200,10)
y <- runif(x)
plot(x,y,xaxt='n')
axis(side = 1, at = x,labels = T)
# Since TRUE is the default for labels, you can just use axis(side=1,at=x)
Be careful that if you don't stretch your window width, then R might not be able to write all your labels in. Play with the window width and you'll see what I mean.
It's too bad that you had such trouble finding documentation! What were your search terms? Try typing r axis into Google, and the first link you will get is that Quick R page that I mentioned earlier. Scroll down to "Axes", and you'll get a very nice little guide on how to do it. You should probably check there first for any plotting questions, it will be faster than waiting for a SO reply.
Hope this coding will helps you :)
plot(x,y,xaxt = 'n')
axis(side=1,at=c(1,20,30,50),labels=c("1975","1980","1985","1990"))
In case of plotting time series, the command ts.plot requires a different argument than xaxt="n"
require(graphics)
ts.plot(ldeaths, mdeaths, xlab="year", ylab="deaths", lty=c(1:2), gpars=list(xaxt="n"))
axis(1, at = seq(1974, 1980, by = 2))
I have a histogram from a list d of values that I make by simply typing
hist(d)
And this is what I get:
How can I make it such that the x-axis extends all the way left to the origin of this plot (the bottom left corner)? Why does it cut off at -0.4?
Macro's answer is by far the simplest route. However, if you really are unhappy with with the default behavior of hist (really, it's the default behavior of axis I suppose) you can always suppress the axes and draw them yourself:
set.seed(123)
d <- rnorm(1000)
hist(d,axes = FALSE)
axis(1,at = seq(-3,3,1),labels = TRUE,pos = 0)
axis(2,pos = -3)
As for the "why?", the defaults for drawing axes have to be set at something, and so there's a lot of code under there that tries pretty hard to ensure that the axis and tick labels are "pretty" according to the sensibilities of, well, whoever wrote it. In general, I think it does a good job, but of course not everyone agrees.
you can tweak the range of x using the xlim tag. For example, try
hist(d,xlim=c(-10,10))
Two suggestions:
#See if this is sufficient:
hist(...)
box()
#If not, try custom axes:
hist(..., xlim = c(-.5, .5), axes = F)
box()
axis(1, seq(-.5, .5, length = 6))
axis(2, seq(0, 30, by = 5))
I want to plot a barplot of some data with some x-axis labels but so far I just keep running into the same problem, as the axis scaling is completely off limits and therefore my labels are wrongly positioned below the bars.
The most simple example I can think of:
x = c(1:81)
barplot(x)
axis(side=1,at=c(0,20,40,60,80),labels=c(20,40,60,80,100))
As you can see, the x-axis does not stretch along the whole plot but stops somewhere in between. It seems to me as if the problem is quite simple, but I somehow I am not able to fix it and I could not find any solution so far :(
Any help is greatly appreciated.
The problem is that barplot is really designed for plotting categorical, not numeric data, and as such it pretty much does its own thing in terms of setting up the horizontal axis scale. The main way to get around this is to recover the actual x-positions of the bar midpoints by saving the results of barplot to a variable, but as you can see below I haven't come up with an elegant way of doing what you want in base graphics. Maybe someone else can do better.
x = c(1:81)
b <- barplot(x)
## axis(side=1,at=c(0,20,40,60,80),labels=c(20,40,60,80,100))
head(b)
You can see here that the actual midpoint locations are 0.7, 1.9, 3.1, ... -- not 1, 2, 3 ...
This is pretty quick, if you don't want to extend the axis from 0 to 100:
b <- barplot(x)
axis(side=1,at=b[c(20,40,60,80)],labels=seq(20,80,by=20))
This is my best shot at doing it in base graphics:
b <- barplot(x,xlim=c(0,120))
bdiff <- diff(b)[1]
axis(side=1,at=c(b[1]-bdiff,b[c(20,40,60,80)],b[81]+19*bdiff),
labels=seq(0,100,by=20))
You can try this, but the bars aren't as pretty:
plot(x,type="h",lwd=4,col="gray",xlim=c(0,100))
Or in ggplot:
library(ggplot2)
d <- data.frame(x=1:81)
ggplot(d,aes(x=x,y=x))+geom_bar(stat="identity",fill="lightblue",
colour="gray")+xlim(c(0,100))
Most statistical graphics nerds will tell you that graphing quantitative (x,y) data is better done with points or lines rather than bars (non-data-ink, Tufte, blah blah blah :-) )
Not sure exactly what you wnat, but If it is to have the labels running from one end to the other evenly places (but not necessarily accurately), then:
x = c(1:81)
bp <- barplot(x)
axis(side=1,at=bp[1+c(0,20,40,60,80)],labels=c(20,40,60,80,100))
The puzzle for me was why you wanted to label "20" at 0. But this is one way to do it.
I run into the same annoying property of batplots - the x coordinates go wild. I would add one another way to show the problem, and that is adding more lines to the plot.
x = c(1:81)
barplot(x)
axis(side=1,at=c(0,20,40,60,80),labels=c(20,40,60,80,100))
lines(c(81,81), c(0, 100)) # this should cross the last bar, but it does not
The best I came with was to define a new barplot function that will take also the parameter "at" for plotting positions of the bars.
barplot_xscaled <- function(bar_heights, at = NA, width = 0.5, col = 'grey'){
if ( is.na(at) ){
at <- c(1:length(bar_heights))
}
plot(bar_heights, type="n", xlab="", ylab="",
ylim=c(0, max(bar_heights)), xlim=range(at), bty = 'n')
for ( i in 1:length(bar_heights)){
rect(at[i] - width, 0, at[i] + width, bar_heights[i], col = col)
}
}
barplot_xscaled(x)
lines(c(81, 81), c(0, 100))
The lines command crosses the last bar - the x scale works just as naively expected, but you could also now define whatever positions of the bars you would like (you could play more with the function a bit to have the same properties as other R plotting functions).