[R] Beginner's question about plotting variables in a time series object with the date on the x axis

[R. Michael Weylandt]

I'm not a huge fan of using R's ts class directly, much preferring to
use zoo or xts (both of which are packages) to enhance. That said, I
think your problem comes from identifying the data/variable name
incorrectly. You've only "ts"ed dados, but you try to plot divliq.pib;
try

plot(dados[,"divliq.pib"])

instead. To get the names functionality, add the optional argument
names= to the ts() call.

If you go to xts, the following should work just fine for you:

library(xts)
dados<-read.csv("dadosR3.csv", header=T)
dados<-xts(dados[,-1], as.Date(dados[,1])) # Assuming your date was in
the left hand column

Now dados will have its names inherited from the header of the CSV and
you can plot them directly as

plot(dados[,"divliq.pib"])

Hope this helps,

Michael Weylandt

On Mon, Oct 17, 2011 at 5:23 PM, Iara Faria <iaragohn at yahoo.com.br> wrote:
> Dear R helpers,
>
> I am a beginner at R so please be gentle :)
> I have already read manuals and FAQs, with no help.
> I have a monthly time series data on public debt with 40 variables, it starts on January 1994 and ends on June 2011.
> I am loading the data into R using read.csv and the data looks ok when I do edit(dados):
>> dados<-read.csv("dadosR3.csv", header=T)
> then I tried making it into a time series object, using:
>> dados2<-ts(dados, start = c(1994,1), frequency=12)
>
> Now when I try plotting any of the variables, for example divliq.pib (net debt), the date doesn't appear on the x axis. How can I do this?
> I use
>> plot.ts(divliq.pib)
>
> also the function names() doesn't work, which would be important since I have so many variables.
>> names(dados2)
> NULL
>
> I am using R.2.13.1
>
> Thank you very much.
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>
>
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