[R] Legend positioning in scaled survival plot

Rachel Pearce rachelpearce at msn.com
Thu Mar 17 13:41:30 CET 2005


I am sorry that this is another novice question. I am having trouble
using "legend" with the survival curve plot from the survival package,
and I wonder if it is because I have rescaled my plot. 

Here is the relevant segment of code:

> plot(survfit(Surv(OS,Status)~shortishcr1),main='Overall Survival by
factor',
+ xlab='Years',ylab='% surviving',lty=c(1,2),xscale=365.25,yscale=100)
> legend(5,80,c('Factor=1','Factor=2'),lty=c(1,2)) 

Here the variable OS is in days, but I want to plot it in years, so I
scale it; likewise y is scaled to a percentage.
I am trying to position the legend in the rescaled x and y values.
Legend returns no error, but no legend appears on the plot.

If I exclude the scaling altogether:

> plot(survfit(Surv(OS,Status)~shortishcr1),main='Overall Survival by
factor',
+ xlab='Years',ylab='% surviving',lty=c(1,2),)
> legend(1825,.8,c('Factor=1','Factor=2'),lty=c(1,2))

then the legend appears exactly as expected.

Using the unscaled version of the legend call with the scaled plot,
however, again no legend appears but no error is returned.

I suspect I am making some elementary mistake, but I just can't see it.
It is so elementary that I can't find a similar question in the
archives. Can someone help?

Here is my version information:
         _              
platform i386-pc-mingw32
arch     i386           
os       mingw32        
system   i386, mingw32  
status                  
major    2              
minor    0.1            
year     2004           
month    11             
day      15             
language R 


Rachel




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