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.
Table of contents
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!