How to Solve R Error: plot.new has not been called yet

The error “plot. new has not been called yet” occurs when you try to do something that requires a plot to exist but have not yet created a plot.

You can solve this by creating a plot first before trying to perform the required action. For example,

# Constructing coordinate vectors
x <- c(3.7, 2.7, 3.6, -2.2, -4.5,
       3.4, 6.7, 4.8, 10.1, -11.9, 12.8, 9.3)
y <- c(1.6, 3.3, 2.3, -4.5, -3.7, 2.8,
       2.7, 1.8, 2.2, 10.4, 1.5, 3.8)

plot(x, y, cex = 1, pch = 3,
     xlab ="x", ylab ="y",
     col ="black")
 
# Try to add horizontal line at y=5
abline(a=3, b=0, lwd=3)

This tutorial will go through the error and how to solve it with code examples.

---

Example #1

Let’s look at an example to reproduce the error:

# Get weight from mtcars dataset

wt <- mtcars$wt

# Get miles per gallon from mtcars dataset

mpg <- mtcars$mpg

wt

Let’s look at the mpg and wt values:

 [1] 2.620 2.875 2.320 3.215 3.440 3.460 3.570 3.190 3.150 3.440 3.440 4.070 3.730 3.780
[15] 5.250 5.424 5.345 2.200 1.615 1.835 2.465 3.520 3.435 3.840 3.845 1.935 2.140 1.513
[29] 3.170 2.770 3.570 2.780

mpg

 [1] 21.0 21.0 22.8 21.4 18.7 18.1 14.3 24.4 22.8 19.2 17.8 16.4 17.3 15.2 10.4 10.4
[17] 14.7 32.4 30.4 33.9 21.5 15.5 15.2 13.3 19.2 27.3 26.0 30.4 15.8 19.7 15.0 21.4

Next, we will try to fit a linear regression model to the data:

# Fit linear regression model to dataset

fit <- lm(mpg ~ wt)

# Get summary of model

summary(fit)

Let’s run the code to get the summary of the fitted model.

Call:
lm(formula = mpg ~ wt)

Residuals:
    Min      1Q  Median      3Q     Max 
-4.5432 -2.3647 -0.1252  1.4096  6.8727 

Coefficients:
            Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)    
(Intercept)  37.2851     1.8776  19.858  < 2e-16 ***
wt           -5.3445     0.5591  -9.559 1.29e-10 ***
---
Signif. codes:  0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1

Residual standard error: 3.046 on 30 degrees of freedom
Multiple R-squared:  0.7528,	Adjusted R-squared:  0.7446 
F-statistic: 91.38 on 1 and 30 DF,  p-value: 1.294e-10

Next, we will try to plot the fitted line using the lines() function:

# Attempt to plot fitted regression line

lines(wt, predict(fit), col='red')

Let’s run the code to see the result:

Error in plot.xy(xy.coords(x, y), type = type, ...) : 
  plot.new has not been called yet

The error occurs because we cannot use the lines() function without creating the plot first.

Solution

We can solve the error by plotting the scatterplot using the plot() function and then call the lines() function to plot the fitted regression line:

plot(wt~mpg)
lines(mpg, predict(fit), col='red')

Let’s run the code to get the result:

Example #2

Let’s look at a second example to reproduce the error.

# Constructing coordinate vectors
x <- c(3.7, 2.7, 3.6, -2.2, -4.5,
       3.4, 6.7, 4.8, 10.1, -11.9, 12.8, 9.3)
y <- c(1.6, 3.3, 2.3, -4.5, -3.7, 2.8,
       2.7, 1.8, 2.2, 10.4, 1.5, 3.8)
 
# Try to add horizontal line at y=3 using the abline() function
abline(a=3, b=0, lwd=3)

Let’s run the code to see what happens:

Error in int_abline(a = a, b = b, h = h, v = v, untf = untf, ...) : 
  plot.new has not been called yet

The error occurs because we cannot use the abline() function without creating a plot first.

Solution

We can solve the error by first creating the scatterplot using the plot() function and then calling the abline() function to add a horizontal line to the scatterplot.

# Constructing coordinate vectors
x <- c(3.7, 2.7, 3.6, -2.2, -4.5,
       3.4, 6.7, 4.8, 10.1, -11.9, 12.8, 9.3)
y <- c(1.6, 3.3, 2.3, -4.5, -3.7, 2.8,
       2.7, 1.8, 2.2, 10.4, 1.5, 3.8)

plot(x, y, cex = 1, pch = 3,
     xlab ="x", ylab ="y",
     col ="black")
 
# Try to add horizontal line at y=5
abline(a=3, b=0, lwd=3)

Let’s run the code to see the result:

Summary

Congratulations on reading to the end of this tutorial!

For further reading on R-related errors, go to the articles: 

• How to Solve R Error in sort.int(x, na.last = na.last, decreasing = decreasing, …) : ‘x’ must be atomic
• How to Solve R Error as.Date.numeric(x) : ‘origin’ must be supplied

Go to the online courses page on R to learn more about coding in R for data science and machine learning.

Have fun and happy researching!