Plot a character vector against a numeric vector in R

Question

I have the following data frame in R:

>AcceptData
  Mean.Rank Sentence.Type
1       2.5       An+Sp+a
2       2.6      An+Nsp+a
3       2.1       An+Sp-a         


        

Answer 1

The default plot function has a method that allows you to plot factors on the x-axis, but to use this, you have to convert your text data to a factor:

Here is an example:

x <- letters[1:5]
y <- runif(5, 0, 5)

plot(factor(x), y)

And with your sample data:

AcceptData <- read.table(text="
Mean.Rank Sentence.Type
1       2.5       An+Sp+a
2       2.6      An+Nsp+a
3       2.1       An+Sp-a
4       3.1      An+Nsp-a
5       2.4       In+Sp+a
6       1.7      In+Nsp+a
7       3.1       In+Sp-a
8       3.0      In+Nsp-a", stringsAsFactors=FALSE)

plot(Mean.Rank~factor(Sentence.Type), AcceptData, las=2, 
     xlab="", main="Mean Acceptability Ranking per Sentence")