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R provides functions to easily plot the rows of a matrix. The most common of these functions are matplot(), plot(), and barplot(). To use these functions, you must first convert your matrix into a dataframe, using as.data.frame(). Once the matrix is converted, you can use the functions to create the desired plot. The inputs to each function will vary depending on the type and size of the matrix. With some practice, you’ll be able to quickly and easily plot the rows of a matrix in R.
Occasionally you may want to plot the rows of a matrix in R as individual lines. Fortunately this is easy to do using the following syntax:
matplot(t(matrix_name), type = "l")
This tutorial provides an example of how to use this syntax in practice.
Example: Plot the Rows of a Matrix in R
First, let’s create a fake matrix to work with that contains three rows:
#make this example reproducible
set.seed(1)
#create matrix
data <- matrix(sample.int(50, 21), nrow=3)
#view matrix
data
[,1] [,2] [,3] [,4] [,5] [,6] [,7]
[1,] 4 34 14 21 7 40 12
[2,] 39 23 18 41 9 25 36
[3,] 1 43 33 10 15 47 48
Next, let’s use matplot to plot the three rows of the matrix as individual lines on a plot:
matplot(t(data), type = "l")
Each line in the plot represents one of the three rows of data in the matrix.
Note: The matplot function is used to plot the columns of a matrix. Thus, we use t() to transpose the matrix so that we instead plot the rows.
We can also modify the width of the lines and add some labels to the plot:
matplot(t(data),
type = "l",
lwd = 2,
main="Plotting the Rows of a Matrix",
ylab="Value")
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