This tutorial only uses the base R packages.

The data files used in this tutorial were created in an earlier exercise. Type the following command to download the objects

load(url("http://mgimond.github.io/ES218/Data/dat1_2.RData"))

This should load several data frame objects into your R session (note that not all are used in this exercise). The first three lines of data frames used in the following sections are shown below:

head(dat1l, 3)
  Year   Crop    Yield
1 1961 Barley 16488.52
2 1962 Barley 18839.00
3 1963 Barley 18808.27
head(dat1w, 3)
  Year   Barley Buckwheat    Maize     Oats      Rye
1 1961 16488.52  10886.67 39183.63 15171.26 11121.79
2 1962 18839.00  11737.50 40620.80 16224.60 12892.77
3 1963 18808.27  11995.00 42595.55 16253.04 11524.11
head(dat2, 3)
   County State B20004001 B20004002 B20004003 B20004004 B20004005 B20004006 B20004007 B20004008 B20004009 B20004010
1 Autauga    al     35881     17407     30169     35327     54917     63317     46227     26055     36440     48243
2 Baldwin    al     31439     16970     25414     31312     44940     54599     40662     20401     31553     42561
3 Barbour    al     25201     15643     20946     24201     42629     48500     31623     20526     29966     32212
B20004011 B20004012 B20004013 B20004014 B20004015 B20004016 B20004017 B20004018
1     64639     79750     27799     15634     23728     27430     42158     49829
2     61454     70349     24694     11772     18670     24040     36010     51107
3     61528     62788     19950     12878     16748     19479     32014     47833

# Base plotting functions

## Point and line plots

The most commonly used plot function in R is plot() which generates both point and line plots. For example, to plot male population median income (dat2$B20004007) vs female population median income (dat2$B20004013) for each county, type:

plot(B20004007 ~ B20004013, dat=dat2)

The above plot command takes two arguments: B20004007 ~ B20004013 which is to be read as plot variable B20004007 as a function of B20004013 and dat=dat2 which tells the plot function which data frame to extract the variables from. Another way to call this command is to type:

plot(dat2$B20004007 ~ dat2$B20004013)

The plot function can take on many other parameters to help tweak the default plot options. For example, we may want to change the axis labels to something more descriptive than the table variable name,

plot(B20004007 ~ B20004013, dat=dat2, xlab = "Female median income ($)", ylab="Male median income ($)")

There are over 3000 unique values which makes it difficult the see what may be going on in the cloud of points. We can change the symbol type to solid fill,pch=20, and set its color to 85% transparent (or 15% opaque), col=rgb(0,0,0,0.15). The rgb() function defines the intensities (on a scale of 0 to 1) for each of the display’s primary colors: red, green and blue. The forth value is optional and provides the fraction opaqueness with a value of 1 being completely opaque.

plot(B20004007 ~ B20004013, dat=dat2, xlab = "Female median income ($)", ylab="Male median income ($)", pch=20, col=rgb(0,0,0,0.15) )

The plot could use additional tweaking, but it may be best to build the plot from scratch as will be demonstrated a few sections down.

By default, the plot command will plot points and not lines. To plot lines, add the type="l" parameter to the plot function. For example, to plot oats crop yield as a function of year from our dat1w dataset, type:

plot(Oats ~ Year, dat=dat1w, type="l", ylab="Oats yield (Hg/Ha)" )

To plot both points and line, set the type parameter to "b" (for both),

plot(Oats ~ Year, dat=dat1w, type="b", pch=20, ylab="Oats yield (Hg/Ha)" )

The plot command can only graph on variable. If you want to add another variable, you will need to call the lines function. We will assign a different line type to this variable (lty=2):

plot(Oats ~ Year, dat=dat1w, type="l", pch=20, ylab="Oats yield (Hg/Ha)" )
lines(Barley ~ Year, dat=dat1w, lty=2)

Note how the plot does not automatically re-scale to accommodate the new line. The plot is a static object meaning that we need to define the axes limits before calling the original plot function. Both axes limits can be set using the xlim and ylim parameters. We don’t need to set the x-axis range since both variables cover the same year range. We will therefore only focus on the y-axis limits. We can grab both the minimum and maximum values for the variables Oats and Barley using the range function, then pass the range to the ylim parameter in the call to plot.

y.rng <- range( c(dat1w$Oats, dat1w$Barley) )
plot(Oats ~ Year, dat=dat1w, type="l", ylab="Oats yield (Hg/Ha)", ylim = y.rng)
lines(Barley ~ Year, dat=dat1w, lty=2)

Point plots from different variables can also be combined into a single plot using the points function in lieu of the lines function. In the following example, male vs. female income for population having a high school degree (blue dots) and a Bachelor’s degree (red dots) will be overlayed on the same plot.

y.rng <- range( c(dat2$B20004009, dat2$B20004011) , na.rm = TRUE)
x.rng <- range( c(dat2$B20004015, dat2$B20004017) , na.rm = TRUE)

# Plot income for HS degree
plot(B20004009 ~ B20004015, dat=dat2, xlab = "Female median income ($)", ylab="Male median income ($)",
pch=20, col=rgb(0,0,1,0.15), xlim=x.rng, ylim=y.rng)

# Add points for Bachelor's degree
points(dat2$B20004011 ~ dat2$B20004017, dat=dat2, pch=20, col=rgb(1,0,0,0.15))

legend("topright", c("HS Degree", "Bachelor's"), pch=20, col= c(rgb(0,0,1,0.15), rgb(1,0,0,0.15) ))

The na.rm=TRUE option is added as a parameter in the range function to prevent a NA value in the data from returning a NA value in the range.

Point symbols are defined by a numeric code. The following figure shows the list of point symbols available in R along with their numeric designation as used with the pch= parameter. The symbol’s color can be defined using the col parameter. For symbols 21 through 25 which have a two-color scheme, col applies to the outline color (blue in the following figure) and bg parameter applies to the fill color (red in the following figure).

You can define the color using the rgb() function, or by a color name such as col="red" or col="bisque". For a full list of color names, type colors() at a command prompt.

Line types can also be customized in the plot function using the lty= parameter. There are six different line types, each identified by a number:

## Boxplots

A boxplot is one of many graphical tools used to summarize the distribution of a data batch. The graphic consists of a “box” that depicts the range covered by 50% of the data (aka the interquartile range, IQR), a horizontal line that displays the median, and “whiskers” that depict 1.5 times the IQR or the largest (for the top half) or smallest (for the bottom half) values.

For example, we can summarize the income range for all individuals as follows:

boxplot(dat2$B20004001, na.rm=TRUE) Note that the boxplot function has no option to specify the data frame as is the case with the plot; we must therefore pass it both the data frame name and the variable as a single argument (i.e. dat2$B20004001).

Several variables can be summarized on the same plot.

boxplot(dat2$B20004001, dat2$B20004007, dat2$B20004013, names=c("All", "Male", "Female"), main="Median income ($)")

The names parameter labels the x-axis.

The outliers can be removed from the plot if desired by setting the outline parameter to FALSE:

boxplot(dat2$B20004001, dat2$B20004007, dat2$B20004013, names=c("All", "Male", "Female"), main="Median income ($)", outline=FALSE)

The boxplot graph can also be plotted horizontally by setting the horizontal parameter to TRUE:

boxplot(dat2$B20004001, dat2$B20004007, dat2$B20004013, names=c("All", "Male", "Female"), main="Median income ($)", outline=FALSE, horizontal = TRUE)

The last two plots highlight on downside in using a table in wide format: the long series of column names passed to the boxplot function. It’s more practical to store such data in long form. To demonstrate this, let’s switch back to the crop data. To plot all columns in dat1w, we would need to type:

boxplot(dat1w$Barley, dat1w$Buckwheat, dat1w$Maize,dat1w$Oats,dat1w$Rye, names=c("Barley", "Buckwheat", "Maize", "Oats", "Rye")) If you use the long version of that table, the command looks like this: boxplot(Yield ~ Crop, dat1l) where ~ Crop tells the function to break the boxplots across unique Crop levels. One can order the boxplots based on the median values. By default, boxplot will order the boxplots following the factor’s level order. In our example, the crop levels are ordered alphabetically. levels(dat1l$Crop)
NULL

To reorder the levels following the median values of yields across each level, we can use the reorder() function:

dat1l$Crop.ord <- reorder(dat1l$Crop, dat1l$Yield, median) This creates a new variable called Crop.ord whose values mirror those in variable Crop but differ in the underlying level order: levels(dat1l$Crop.ord)
[1] "Buckwheat" "Rye"       "Oats"      "Barley"    "Maize"    

If we wanted the order to be in descending order, we would prefix the value parameter with the negative operator as in reorder(dat1l$Crop, -dat1l$Yield, median).

The function reorder takes three arguments: the factor whose levels are to be reordered (Crop), the value whose quantity will determine the new order (Yield) and the statistic that will be used to summarize the values across each factor’s level (median).

The modified boxplot expression now looks like:

boxplot(Yield ~ Crop.ord, dat1l)

## Histograms

The histogram is another form of data distribution visualization. It consists of partitioning a batch of values into intervals of equal length then tallying their count in each interval. The length of each bar represents these counts. For example, we can plot the histogram of maize yields using the hist function as follows:

hist(dat1w$Maize, xlab = "Maize", main=NA) ## Density plot Histograms have their pitfalls, one of which that changes in the number of bins can drastically affect the appearance of a batch distribution. One alternative is the density plot which, for a series of points, computes the density of values at each location. This generates a “smoothed” look of the distribution of values. Unlike the other plotting functions, it does not generate a plot but instead, a list of outputs. But the output of density can be wrapped with a plot function to generate the plot. dens <- density(dat1w$Maize)
plot(dens, main = "Density distribution of Maize yields")

# Customizing plots

So far, you have learned how to customize point and line symbols, but this may not be enough. You might want to modify other graphic elements such as the axes layout and label formats for publication. Let’s see how we can further customize a plot of median income for male and female population having attained a HS degree.

First, we plot the points but omit the axes and its labels with the parameters axes = FALSE, xlab = NA, ylab = NA. We will want both axes to cover the same range of values, so we will use the range function to find min and max values for both male and female income.

Next, we draw the x axis using the axis function. The first parameter to this function is a number that indicates which axis is to be drawn (i.e. 1=bottom x, 2=left y, 3=top x and 4=right y). We will then use the mtext function to place the axis label under the axis line.

# Plot the points without the axes
rng <- range(dat2$B20004009, dat2$B20004015, na.rm=TRUE)
plot(B20004009 ~ B20004015, dat=dat2, pch=20, col=rgb(0,0,0,0.15),
xlim=rng, ylim=rng, axes = FALSE, xlab = NA, ylab = NA )

# Plot the x-axis
lab <- c("5,000", "25,000", "45,000", "$65,000") axis(1, at=seq(5000,65000, length.out=4), label=lab) # Plot x label mtext("Female median income (HS degree)", side=1, line=2) Next, we will tackle the y-axis. We will rotate both the tic labels and axis label horizontally and place the axis label at the top of the axis. This will involve a different approach to that used for the x-axis. First, we need to identify each plot region’s corner coordinate values using the par function. Second, we will use the text function instead of the mtext function to place the axis label. First, let’s plot the y-axis with the custom tic labels. # Plot the y-axis axis(2, las=1, at=seq(5000,65000, length.out=4), label=lab) Now let’s extract the plot’s corner coordinate values. loc <- par("usr") loc [1] 3850 68650 3850 68650 The corner location coordinate values are in the plot’s x and y units. We want to place the label in the upper left hand corner whose coordinate values are loc[1]= 3850 and loc[2]= 68650. text(loc[1], loc[4], "Male median\nincome", pos = 3, adj = 1, xpd = TRUE) The string \n in the text "Median\nIncome" is interpreted in R as being a carriage return–i.e it forces the text that follows this string to be printed on the next line. The other parameters of interest are pos and adj that position and adjust the label location (type ?axis for more information on axis parameters) and the parameter xpd=TRUE allows for the text function to display text outside of the plot region. # Exporting plots to image file formats You might need to export your plots as standalone image files for publications. R will export to many different raster image file formats such as jpg, png, gif and tiff, and several vector file formats such as PostScript, svg and PDF. You can specify the image resolution (in dpi), the image height and width, and the size of the margins. The following example saves the last plot as an uncompressed tiff file with a 5“x6” dimension and a resolution of 300 dpi. This is accomplished by simply book-ending the plotting routines between the tiff() and dev.off() functions: tiff(filename = "fig1.tif", width = 5, height = 6, units = "in", compression = "none", res = 300) # Plot the points without the axes rng <- range(dat2$B20004009, dat2$B20004015, na.rm=TRUE) plot(B20004009 ~ B20004015, dat=dat2, pch=20, col=rgb(0,0,0,0.15), xlim=rng, ylim=rng, axes = FALSE, xlab = NA, ylab = NA ) # Plot the x-axis lab <- c("5,000", "25,000", "45,000", "$65,000")
axis(1, at=seq(5000,65000, length.out=4),  label=lab)
# Plot x label
mtext("Female median income (HS degree)", side=1, line=2)
# Plot the y-axis
axis(2, las=1, at=seq(5000,65000, length.out=4), label=lab)
text(loc[1], loc[4], "Male median\nincome", pos = 3, adj = 1, xpd = TRUE)

dev.off()

To save the same plot to a pdf file format, simply substitute tiff() with pdf() and adjust the parameters as needed:

pdf(file = "fig1.pdf", width = 5, height = 6)

# Plot the points without the axes
rng <- range(dat2$B20004009, dat2$B20004015, na.rm=TRUE)
plot(B20004009 ~ B20004015, dat=dat2, pch=20, col=rgb(0,0,0,0.15),
xlim=rng, ylim=rng, axes = FALSE, xlab = NA, ylab = NA )
# Plot the x-axis
lab <- c("5,000", "25,000", "45,000", "\$65,000")
axis(1, at=seq(5000,65000, length.out=4),  label=lab)
# Plot x label
mtext("Female median income (HS degree)", side=1, line=2)
# Plot the y-axis
axis(2, las=1, at=seq(5000,65000, length.out=4), label=lab)
text(loc[1], loc[4], "Male median\nincome", pos = 3, adj = 1, xpd = TRUE)

dev.off()