Course Description

This course provides a comprehensive introduction on how to plot data with R’s default graphics system, base graphics.

After an introduction to base graphics, we look at a number of R plotting examples, from simple graphs such as scatterplots to plotting correlation matrices. The course finishes with exercises in plot customization. This includes using R plot colors effectively and creating and saving complex plots in R.

Base Graphics Background
R supports four different graphics systems: base graphics, grid graphics, lattice graphics, and ggplot2. Base graphics is the default graphics system in R, the easiest of the four systems to learn to use, and provides a wide variety of useful tools, especially for exploratory graphics where we wish to learn what is in an unfamiliar dataset.