Adding Labels to Points in a Scatter Plot in R

What’s the Scatter?

A scatter plot displays the values of 2 variables for a set of data, and it is a very useful way to visualize data during exploratory data analysis, especially (though not exclusively) when you are interested in the relationship between a predictor variable and a target variable.  Sometimes, such data come with categorical labels that have important meanings, and the visualization of the relationship can be enhanced when these labels are attached to the data.

It is common practice to use a legend to label data that belong to a group, as I illustrated in a previous post on bar charts and pie charts.  However, what if every datum has a unique label, and there are many data in the scatter plot?  A legend would add unnecessary clutter in such situations.  Instead, it would be useful to write the label of each datum near its point in the scatter plot. I will show how to do this in R, illustrating the code with a built-in data set called LifeCycleSavings.