R Language Base Plotting Combining Plots

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Example

It's often useful to combine multiple plot types in one graph (for example a Barplot next to a Scatterplot.) R makes this easy with the help of the functions par() and layout().

par()

par uses the arguments mfrow or mfcol to create a matrix of nrows and ncols c(nrows, ncols) which will serve as a grid for your plots. The following example shows how to combine four plots in one graph:

par(mfrow=c(2,2))
plot(cars, main="Speed vs. Distance")
hist(cars$speed, main="Histogram of Speed")
boxplot(cars$dist, main="Boxplot of Distance")
boxplot(cars$speed, main="Boxplot of Speed")

Four plots combined in one plot

layout()

The layout() is more flexible and allows you to specify the location and the extent of each plot within the final combined graph. This function expects a matrix object as an input:

layout(matrix(c(1,1,2,3), 2,2, byrow=T))
hist(cars$speed, main="Histogram of Speed")
boxplot(cars$dist, main="Boxplot of Distance")
boxplot(cars$speed, main="Boxplot of Speed")

Three plots combined in one plot using layout().



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