Coloring data in scatterplot 3d in r

Question

I am trying to visualize data using R and scatterplot3d.

I have loaded data and used

colors <- c("#999999", "#E69F00", "#56B4E9" )
scatterplot3d(output$X2,output$X6 , output$X7 , color=colors, pch="X9")

X9 is label column in my dataset. it contains categories eg "ab" , "cpu" , "imdb" and so on.

By documentation:

color : colors of points in the plot, optional if x is an appropriate structure. Will be ignored if highlight.3d = TRUE.

pch: plotting "character", ie symbol to use.

Yet I still get this error

Error in scatterplot3d(output$X2, output$X6, output$X7, color = colors, : length(color) must be equal length(x) or 1

I assumed I had to put color for every column in dataset , but creating such array where length( colors ) = length(num of columns) yields same error.

What is the right way to add colors?

Thanks for help.

Answer 1

You have fewer colors than data points. You must select one color for each point. Since X9 seems to be a string, you can use as.factor to assign a unique number to each value.

scatterplot3d(output$X2,output$X6 , output$X7 , color=colors[as.factor(output$X9)], pch=20)