Scatter Plots

The first plot style we will be looking at is a scatter plot. To plot a scatter plot you will use the most common function in base r to plot it, plot() .

# plot(x, y,
#       xlab = "Independent Variable (x)", # Label for the x-axis
#       ylab = "Dependent Variable (y)", # Label for the y-axis
#       xlim = c(0, 12), # Limits for the x-axis
#       ylim = c(0, 120), # Limits for the y-axis
#       main = "Scatterplot of the Relationship between X and Y", 
#               Main title of the plot
#       col = "black", # Color of the points
#       pch = 19) # Shape of points

In the following example, we will plot the qualifying position for the 20 drivers and the final points they were awarded for the Las Vegas Grand Prix in 2023.

library(tidyverse)

── Attaching core tidyverse packages ──────────────────────── tidyverse 2.0.0 ──
✔ dplyr     1.1.4     ✔ readr     2.1.5
✔ forcats   1.0.0     ✔ stringr   1.5.1
✔ ggplot2   3.5.1     ✔ tibble    3.2.1
✔ lubridate 1.9.3     ✔ tidyr     1.3.1
✔ purrr     1.0.4     
── Conflicts ────────────────────────────────────────── tidyverse_conflicts() ──
✖ dplyr::filter() masks stats::filter()
✖ dplyr::lag()    masks stats::lag()
ℹ Use the conflicted package (<http://conflicted.r-lib.org/>) to force all conflicts to become errors

library(RandomData)

scatterplot <- race_stats |>
  filter(circuit == "Las Vegas Strip Street Circuit" & year == "2023")

plot(scatterplot$quali_position, scatterplot$points,
     xlab= "Qualifying Position",
     ylab= "Points Awarded",
     xlim = c(0, 20),
     ylim = c(0, 25), 
     main = "Qualifying Position vs. Points Awarded at Las Vegas GP 2023",
     col = "black", 
     pch = 19)

If you wanted to add a line that shows the correlation we can do this by adding the lines() after the plot.

plot(scatterplot$quali_position, scatterplot$points,
     xlab= "Qualifying Position",
     ylab= "Points Awarded",
     xlim = c(0, 20),
     ylim = c(0, 25), 
     main = "Qualifying Position vs. Points Awarded at Las Vegas GP 2023",
     col = "black", 
     pch = 19)
lines(lowess(scatterplot$quali_position, scatterplot$points), col = "red")