Dot plot in R (Dot Chart)

Dot plot in R also known as dot chart is an alternative to bar charts, where the bars are replaced by dots. A simple Dot plot in R can be created using dotchart function dotchart(). Lets see few examples on how to create dot plot.

Syntax of dotchart() function in R for Dot plot:

dotchart (NumericVector,  cex = 1, col = “black”, labels = NULL, main = NULL, pch = 1, sub = NULL, xlab = NULL)
NumericVector Numeric vector to be plotted
cex plot scaling factor(size) . More the value of cex, more the plot size will be
col colour of the dot
labels A vector containing the label names for each plotted value.
main Title of the dot chart
pch numeric value which decides the type of plot … if pch=1 then dot, pch=2 then triangle, pch=3 then ‘+’
sub subtitle of the dot chart
xlab x axis label

 

 

Example of dot plot in R

We will use the PlantGrowth data set to depict an example of R dot plot


#simple dot plot in R

dotchart(PlantGrowth$weight,col="red",pch=1,labels=PlantGrowth$group,
main="group vs weight",
xlab="weight")

the above dotchart() function takes up numeric vector as first argument and plots the red dots with labels and title. So the output will be

dot plot in R or dot chart in R

Dot plot in R for groups:

Suppose if we want to create the different dot plots for different group of the same data set, how to do that? For Example PlantGrowth data set have 3 groups ctrl, trt1 and trt2. Lets demonstrate how to differentiate among these 3 groups while plotting a dot chart


#Dot chart in R for groups
#subset and assign colour

pg <- PlantGrowth
pg$color[pg$group=="ctrl"] <- "red"
pg$color[pg$group=="trt1"] <- "Violet"
pg$color[pg$group=="trt2"] <- "blue"



# plot the dot chart
dotchart(PlantGrowth$weight, labels=PlantGrowth$group,cex=0.8,groups= PlantGrowth$group,
main="group vs weight",
xlab="weight", gcolor="black", color=pg$color)

 

First subset the groups and assign different colour for different groups. Then with the help of dotchart() function use the argument,  groups= PlantGrowth$group  and color= pg$color  as shown above

So the output will be

dot plot in R or dot chart in R with groups

 

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Author

  • Sridhar Venkatachalam

    With close to 10 years on Experience in data science and machine learning Have extensively worked on programming languages like R, Python (Pandas), SAS, Pyspark.

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