How to overlay scatterplots in R?

r scatter-plot
Cath Penfold picture Cath Penfold · Oct 1, 2013 · Viewed 70.3k times · Source

If I have three sets of data :

a1= rnorm(10)
a2= rnorm(10)
a3= rnorm(10)

rather than looking at these side by side using:

par(mfrow=c(1,3))
plot(a1)
plot(a2)
plot(a3)

How do I get all these points on the same plot?

Answer

csgillespie picture csgillespie · Oct 1, 2013

Just use the points function:

plot(a1)
points(a2, col=2)
points(a3, col=3)

This is equivilent to:

plot(1:length(a1), a1)
points(1:length(a2), a2, col=2)
points(1:length(a3), a3, col=3)

If the vectors have unequal lengths, then you should specify the x-axis limit:

plot(a1, xlim=c(1, max(length(a1), length(a2), length(a3))))

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