You may have read in your data incorrectly - a column you expected to be numeric was not recognized as such so it was read in a character and then converted to a 'factor'.
FAQ 7.10 tells how to work around the problem https://cran.r-project.org/doc/FAQ/R-FAQ.html#How-do-I-convert-factors-to-numeric_003f but a better solution is to repeatedly call read.table with various parameters (esp. colClasses=c(...), header=TRUE/FALSE, dec=","/".", stringsAsFactors=FALSE) until str(yourData) shows you that all the column types are what you expect. It is a waste of time to do much of anything with your data until str(yourData) and some simple plots of it show you that it was read into R correctly. Bill Dunlap TIBCO Software wdunlap tibco.com On Wed, Jan 6, 2016 at 12:01 PM, Andy Schneider <andyschneide...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi - > > I'm trying to plot some data and having a lot of trouble! I have a simple > dataset consisting of two columns - income_per_capita and > mass_beauty_value. > When I read the data in and plot it, I get the attached plot Mass Beauty > Non-Numeric: > <http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/file/n4716202/Mass_Beauty_Non-Numeric.jpg> > . > You can see that, while it contains all the values, the income_per_capita > axis is out of order and there are some weird vertical lines happening. > > To fix this, I converted both columns to numerics using: > > mass_beauty$income_per_capita <- as.numeric(mass_beauty$income_per_capita) > mass_beauty$mass_beauty_value <- as.numeric(mass_beauty$mass_beauty_value) > > When I did this, I noticed that my income_per_capita column's values > suddenly changed. Whereas I have values extending all the way to 30,000 or > so before, now they maxed out at around 1,400. While at first I thought > they > might at least have changed to scale, it unfortunately looks like changes > were more or less random. But, they plotted much better: > <http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/file/n4716202/Mass_Beauty_Plot.jpg> . > > Does anyone have any solution for how I can convert my income_per_capita > column to a plottable numeric without changing up its values? I've tried > doing as.numeric(as.character(mass_beauty_value$income_per_capita)) but it > didn't work. > > Thanks so much for your help! > ______________________________________________ > R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide > http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.