Data Science – Commonly Used Plot Parameters in R Programming

• What are some of the common plots (commands) in R?
• Commonly Used Plot Parameters

What are some of the common plots (commands) in R?

Following represents some of the plots (commands) used in R language for different purposes. I shall be writing different blog on different use-cases where one should use one or more of the following plots:

• plot
• barplot
• hist
• stem
• mosaicplot
• pie
• boxplot

Commonly Used Plot Parameters

Following are some of the commonly used parameters:

• main: “main” parameter is used to give the title for the plot
• ylim: “ylim” parameter is used to limit the numbers on the Y-axis. It is defined using following format: ylim=c(0,10) which sets the numbers on Y-axis starting from 0 going upto 10. The plots get adjusted accordingly.
• xlim: “xlim” parameter is used to limit the numbers on the X-axis. It is defined using following format: xlim=c(0,15) which sets the numbers on X-axis starting from 0 going upto 15. The plots get adjusted accordingly.
• las: Setting las=1 turns the numbers horizontally on the Y-axis.
• xlab: xlab=”Label X” sets the label of X-axis to “Label X”
• ylab: ylab=”Label Y” sets the label of Y-axis to “Label Y”
• col: col is used to set the color of the plotting points or line wherever applicable with different kind of plots. For example, col=2 sets the color as red. col=4 sets the color as blue. One could use additional attributes with col to change the color of title (col.main), labels (col.lab), axis points (col.axis)
• lwd: lwd is used to set the width of the line in the plots. The value could be 1,2,3,4,5 etc.
• cex: “cex” argument is used to change the size of the plotting characters. cex with further attributes could be used to change the size of title (cex.main), x and y-axis labels (cex.lab), x and y-axis (cex.axis) points etc.
• font: font command is used to change the font of title (font.main), labels (font.lab), axis (font.axis) etc.

For pie-charts, only “main” makes sense to be used.