plot line over last part of barplot

Question

I have a barplot for which the second half should fit this formula: y~axexp(-b*x^2). Now I want to plot the entire barplot and display the fitted model over the last part of the barplot as it only holds for that part. However, I cannot find a way to display the line-graph only over the second half. If I just do something like

submitted=c(1L, 1L, 1L, 1L, 1L, 1L, 2L, 1L, 2L, 2L, 3L, 2L, 1L, 1L, 4L, 
3L, 2L, 11L, 6L, 2L, 16L, 7L, 17L, 36L, 27L, 39L, 41L, 33L, 42L, 
66L, 92L, 138L, 189L, 249L, 665L, 224L, 309L, 247L, 641L, 777L, 
671L, 532L, 749L, 506L, 315L, 292L, 281L, 130L, 137L, 91L, 40L, 
27L, 34L, 19L, 1L)
x=seq(0:(length(submitted)-1))
y1=rs$submitted[30:(length(submitted)-1)]
x1=seq(0:(length(y1)-1))
fit1=nls(y1~a*x1*exp(-b*x1^2),start=list(a=500,b=.01),trace=TRUE)
barplot(submitted,names.arg=x, las=2, cex.axis=0.8, cex=0.8)
lines(predict(fit1))

The line is displayed, but in the wrong position. So how can I control where the line is drawn?

Answer 1

A reproducible example would have been helpful, but probably the issue is that the bars are not located at the x-coordinates that you expect. You can find out the x-coordinates of the bars by capturing the output of the barplot function:

dat <- 1:5                   # fake data for barplot
fit <- dat+rnorm(5, sd=0.1)  # fake fitted values

bp <- barplot(dat)           # draw plot and capture x-coordinates
lines(bp, fit)               # add line

Edit:
The same principle can be used for adding a partial line. Rewriting your code a bit to get an index idx showing the parts of the data that you want to model:

x <- 0:(length(submitted)-1) 
idx <- 30:(length(submitted)-1)  # the part of the data to be modeled
y1 <- submitted[idx] 
x1 <- idx-30 
fit1 <- nls(y1~a*x1*exp(-b*x1^2),start=list(a=500,b=.01),trace=TRUE) 
# capture the midpoints from the barplot
bp <- barplot(submitted,names.arg=x, las=2, cex.axis=0.8, cex=0.8) 
# subset the midpoints to the range of the fit
lines(bp[idx], predict(fit1)) 

(note that I also changed seq(0:n) to 0:n, because the first does not give you a sequence of 0 to n.)