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

[David Winsemius]

On Oct 17, 2011, at 5:23 PM, Iara Faria 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 agree with Weyland. Figuring out how to use class `ts` objects in R  
is difficult. If it were easy I don't think Zeileis would have  
invented `zoo`.

> 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)

(See below for what that did.)

>
> 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)


Try:

plot(time(dados2), dados[, "divliq.pib"] , xy.labels=FALSE))

>
> also the function names() doesn't work, which would be important  
> since I have so many variables.
>> names(dados2)

Read the help page again(?). "A data frame will be coerced to a  
numeric matrix via data.matrix."

The names function only works for lists and name vectors. Try colnames()

> NULL
>
> I am using R.2.13.1
>
> Thank you very much.
> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
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David Winsemius, MD
West Hartford, CT