In R base plot, move axis label closer to axis

RPlotAxis Labels

R Problem Overview


I have eliminated labels on the y axis because only the relative amount is really important.

w <- c(34170,24911,20323,14290,9605,7803,7113,6031,5140,4469)
plot(1:length(w), w, type="b", xlab="Number of clusters",
     ylab="Within-cluster variance",
     main="K=5 eliminates most of the within-cluster variance",
     cex.main=1.5,
     cex.lab=1.2,
     font.main=20,
     yaxt='n',lab=c(length(w),5,7), # no ticks on y axis, all ticks on x
     family="Calibri Light")

cluster plot

However, suppressing those tick labels leaves a lot of white space between the y axis label ("Within-cluster variance") and the y axis. Is there a way to nudge it back over? If I somehow set the (invisible) tick labels to go inside the axis, would the axis label settles along the axis?

R Solutions


Solution 1 - R

Try setting ylab="" in your plot call and use title to set the label of the y-axis manually. Using line you could adjust the position of the label, e.g.:

plot(1:length(w), w, type="b", xlab="Number of clusters", ylab="",
     main="K=5 eliminates most of the within-cluster variance",
     cex.main=1.5,
     cex.lab=1.2,
     font.main=20,
     yaxt='n',lab=c(length(w),5,7), # no ticks on y axis, all ticks on x
     family="Calibri Light")

title(ylab="Within-cluster variance", line=0, cex.lab=1.2, family="Calibri Light")

enter image description here

Please read ?title for more details.

Solution 2 - R

Adjust mgp, see ?par

title(ylab="Within-cluster variance", mgp=c(1,1,0), family="Calibri Light",cex.lab=1.2)

enter image description here

Attributions

All content for this solution is sourced from the original question on Stackoverflow.

The content on this page is licensed under the Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.

Content TypeOriginal AuthorOriginal Content on Stackoverflow
QuestionC8H10N4O2View Question on Stackoverflow
Solution 1 - RsgibbView Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 2 - Rxb.View Answer on Stackoverflow