Open a web browser and go to http://cran.r-project.org and download and install it
Also helpful to install RStudio (download from http://rstudio.com)
In R, type install.packages("tidyverse")
to install a suite of usefull packages including ggplot2
Download materials from http://tutorials.iq.harvard.edu/R/Rgraphics.zip
Extract the zip file containing the materials to your desktop
Class Structure and Organization:
This is an intermediate R course:
ggplot2
graphics–other packages will not be coveredMy goal: by the end of the workshop you will be able to reproduce this graphic from the Economist:
img
ggplot2
?Advantages of ggplot2
grammar of graphics
(Wilkinson, 2005)That said, there are some things you cannot (or should not) do With ggplot2:
The basic idea: independently specify plot building blocks and combine them to create just about any kind of graphical display you want. Building blocks of a graph include:
The ggplot2
packages is included in a popular collection of packages called “the tidyverse”. Take a moment to ensure that it is installed, and that we have attached the ggplot2
package.
## ── Attaching packages ────────────────────────────────── tidyverse 1.2.1 ──
## ✔ ggplot2 3.0.0 ✔ purrr 0.2.5
## ✔ tibble 1.4.2 ✔ dplyr 0.7.6
## ✔ tidyr 0.8.1 ✔ stringr 1.3.1
## ✔ readr 1.1.1 ✔ forcats 0.3.0
## ── Conflicts ───────────────────────────────────── tidyverse_conflicts() ──
## ✖ dplyr::filter() masks stats::filter()
## ✖ dplyr::lag() masks stats::lag()
Housing prices
Let’s look at housing prices.
## Parsed with column specification:
## cols(
## State = col_character(),
## region = col_character(),
## Date = col_double(),
## Home.Value = col_integer(),
## Structure.Cost = col_integer(),
## Land.Value = col_integer(),
## Land.Share..Pct. = col_double(),
## Home.Price.Index = col_double(),
## Land.Price.Index = col_double(),
## Year = col_integer(),
## Qrtr = col_integer()
## )
## # A tibble: 6 x 5
## State region Date Home.Value Structure.Cost
## <chr> <chr> <dbl> <int> <int>
## 1 AK West 2010. 224952 160599
## 2 AK West 2010. 225511 160252
## 3 AK West 2010. 225820 163791
## 4 AK West 2010 224994 161787
## 5 AK West 2008 234590 155400
## 6 AK West 2008. 233714 157458
ggplot2
VS Base GraphicsCompared to base graphics, ggplot2
data.frame
)ggplot2
VS Base for simple graphsBase graphics histogram example:
ggplot2
histogram example:
## `stat_bin()` using `bins = 30`. Pick better value with `binwidth`.
ggplot2
Base graphics VS ggplot
for more complex graphs:Base graphics colored scatter plot example:
plot(Home.Value ~ Date,
col = factor(State),
data = filter(housing, State %in% c("MA", "TX")))
legend("topleft",
legend = c("MA", "TX"),
col = c("black", "red"),
pch = 1)
ggplot2
colored scatter plot example:
ggplot(filter(housing, State %in% c("MA", "TX")),
aes(x=Date,
y=Home.Value,
color=State))+
geom_point()
ggplot2
wins!
In ggplot land aesthetic means “something you can see”. Examples include:
Each type of geom accepts only a subset of all aesthetics–refer to the geom help pages to see what mappings each geom accepts. Aesthetic mappings are set with the aes()
function.
geom
)Geometric objects are the actual marks we put on a plot. Examples include:
geom_point
, for scatter plots, dot plots, etc)geom_line
, for time series, trend lines, etc)geom_boxplot
, for, well, boxplots!)A plot must have at least one geom; there is no upper limit. You can add a geom to a plot using the +
operator
You can get a list of available geometric objects using the code below:
or simply type geom_<tab>
in any good R IDE (such as Rstudio or ESS) to see a list of functions starting with geom_
.
Now that we know about geometric objects and aesthetic mapping, we can make a ggplot. geom_point
requires mappings for x and y, all others are optional.
hp2001Q1 <- filter(housing, Date == 2001.25)
ggplot(hp2001Q1,
aes(y = Structure.Cost, x = Land.Value)) +
geom_point()
A plot constructed with ggplot
can have more than one geom. In that case the mappings established in the ggplot()
call are plot defaults that can be added to or overridden. Our plot could use a regression line:
hp2001Q1$pred.SC <- predict(lm(Structure.Cost ~ log(Land.Value), data = hp2001Q1))
p1 <- ggplot(hp2001Q1, aes(x = log(Land.Value), y = Structure.Cost))
p1 + geom_point(aes(color = Home.Value)) +
geom_line(aes(y = pred.SC))
Not all geometric objects are simple shapes–the smooth geom includes a line and a ribbon.
## `geom_smooth()` using method = 'loess' and formula 'y ~ x'
Each geom
accepts a particualar set of mappings;for example geom_text()
accepts a labels
mapping.
## install.packages("ggrepel")
library("ggrepel")
p1 +
geom_point() +
geom_text_repel(aes(label=State), size = 3)
Note that variables are mapped to aesthetics with the aes()
function, while fixed aesthetics are set outside the aes()
call. This sometimes leads to confusion, as in this example:
p1 +
geom_point(aes(size = 2),# incorrect! 2 is not a variable
color="red") # this is fine -- all points red
Other aesthetics are mapped in the same way as x and y in the previous example.
## Warning: Removed 1 rows containing missing values (geom_point).
The data for the exercises is available in the dataSets/EconomistData.csv
file. Read it in with
## Parsed with column specification:
## cols(
## Country = col_character(),
## HDI.Rank = col_integer(),
## HDI = col_double(),
## CPI = col_double(),
## Region = col_character()
## )
Original sources for these data are http://www.transparency.org/content/download/64476/1031428 http://hdrstats.undp.org/en/indicators/display_cf_xls_indicator.cfm?indicator_id=103106&lang=en
These data consist of Human Development Index and Corruption Perception Index scores for several countries.
Some plot types (such as scatterplots) do not require transformations–each point is plotted at x and y coordinates equal to the original value. Other plots, such as boxplots, histograms, prediction lines etc. require statistical transformations:
Each geom
has a default statistic, but these can be changed. For example, the default statistic for geom_bar
is stat_bin
:
## function (mapping = NULL, data = NULL, stat = "bin", position = "stack",
## ..., binwidth = NULL, bins = NULL, na.rm = FALSE, show.legend = NA,
## inherit.aes = TRUE)
## NULL
## function (mapping = NULL, data = NULL, geom = "bar", position = "stack",
## ..., binwidth = NULL, bins = NULL, center = NULL, boundary = NULL,
## breaks = NULL, closed = c("right", "left"), pad = FALSE,
## na.rm = FALSE, show.legend = NA, inherit.aes = TRUE)
## NULL
Arguments to stat_
functions can be passed through geom_
functions. This can be slightly annoying because in order to change it you have to first determine which stat the geom uses, then determine the arguments to that stat.
For example, here is the default histogram of Home.Value:
## `stat_bin()` using `bins = 30`. Pick better value with `binwidth`.
can change it by passing the binwidth
argument to the stat_bin
function:
Sometimes the default statistical transformation is not what you need. This is often the case with pre-summarized data:
housing.sum <- aggregate(housing["Home.Value"], housing["State"], FUN=mean)
rbind(head(housing.sum), tail(housing.sum))
## State Home.Value
## 1 AK 147385.14
## 2 AL 92545.22
## 3 AR 82076.84
## 4 AZ 140755.59
## 5 CA 282808.08
## 6 CO 158175.99
## 46 VA 155391.44
## 47 VT 132394.60
## 48 WA 178522.58
## 49 WI 108359.45
## 50 WV 77161.71
## 51 WY 122897.25
## Error: stat_count() must not be used with a y aesthetic.
What is the problem with the previous plot? Basically we take binned and summarized data and ask ggplot to bin and summarize it again (remember, geom_bar
defaults to stat = stat_count
); obviously this will not work. We can fix it by telling geom_bar
to use a different statistical transformation function:
geom_smooth
.geom_smooth
, but use a linear model for the predictions. Hint: see ?stat_smooth
.geom_line
. Hint: change the statistical transformation.?loess
.geom_smooth
## `geom_smooth()` using method = 'loess' and formula 'y ~ x'
geom_smooth
, but use a linear model for the predictions. Hint: see ?stat_smooth
.geom_line
. Hint: change the statistical transformation.?loess
.## `geom_smooth()` using method = 'loess' and formula 'y ~ x'
Aesthetic mapping (i.e., with aes()
) only says that a variable should be mapped to an aesthetic. It doesn’t say how that should happen. For example, when mapping a variable to shape with aes(shape = x)
you don’t say what shapes should be used. Similarly, aes(color = z)
doesn’t say what colors should be used. Describing what colors/shapes/sizes etc. to use is done by modifying the corresponding scale. In ggplot2
scales include
Scales are modified with a series of functions using a scale_<aesthetic>_<type>
naming scheme. Try typing scale_<tab>
to see a list of scale modification functions.
The following arguments are common to most scales in ggplot2:
Specific scale functions may have additional arguments; for example, the scale_color_continuous
function has arguments low
and high
for setting the colors at the low and high end of the scale.
Start by constructing a dotplot showing the distribution of home values by Date and State.
p3 <- ggplot(housing,
aes(x = State,
y = Home.Price.Index)) +
theme(legend.position="top",
axis.text=element_text(size = 6))
(p4 <- p3 + geom_point(aes(color = Date),
alpha = 0.5,
size = 1.5,
position = position_jitter(width = 0.25, height = 0)))
Now modify the breaks for the x axis and color scales
p4 + scale_x_discrete(name="State Abbreviation") +
scale_color_continuous(name="",
breaks = c(1976, 1994, 2013),
labels = c("'76", "'94", "'13"))
Next change the low and high values to blue and red:
p4 +
scale_x_discrete(name="State Abbreviation") +
scale_color_continuous(name="",
breaks = c(1976, 1994, 2013),
labels = c("'76", "'94", "'13"),
low = "blue", high = "red")
##
## Attaching package: 'scales'
## The following object is masked from 'package:purrr':
##
## discard
## The following object is masked from 'package:readr':
##
## col_factor
p4 +
scale_color_continuous(name="",
breaks = c(1976, 1994, 2013),
labels = c("'76", "'94", "'13"),
low = muted("blue"), high = muted("red"))
ggplot2 has a wide variety of color scales; here is an example using scale_color_gradient2
to interpolate between three different colors.
p4 +
scale_color_gradient2(name="",
breaks = c(1976, 1994, 2013),
labels = c("'76", "'94", "'13"),
low = muted("blue"),
high = muted("red"),
mid = "gray60",
midpoint = 1994)
Scale | Types | Examples |
---|---|---|
scale_color_ |
identity |
scale_fill_continuous |
scale_fill_ |
manual |
scale_color_discrete |
scale_size_ |
continuous |
scale_size_manual |
discrete |
scale_size_discrete |
|
scale_shape_ |
discrete |
scale_shape_discrete |
scale_linetype_ |
identity |
scale_shape_manual |
manual |
scale_linetype_discrete |
|
scale_x_ |
continuous |
scale_x_continuous |
scale_y_ |
discrete |
scale_y_discrete |
reverse |
scale_x_log |
|
log |
scale_y_reverse |
|
date |
scale_x_date |
|
datetime |
scale_y_datetime |
|
Note that in RStudio you can type scale_
followed by TAB to get the whole list of available scales.
?scale_color_manual
.ggplot(dat, aes(x = CPI, y = HDI, color = "Region")) +
geom_point() +
scale_x_continuous(name = "Corruption Perception Index") +
scale_y_continuous(name = "Human Development Index") +
scale_color_discrete(name = "Region of the world")
?scale_color_manual
.ggplot(dat, aes(x = CPI, y = HDI, color = "Region")) +
geom_point() +
scale_x_continuous(name = "Corruption Perception Index") +
scale_y_continuous(name = "Human Development Index") +
scale_color_manual(name = "Region of the world",
values = c("#24576D",
"#099DD7",
"#28AADC",
"#248E84",
"#F2583F",
"#96503F"))
ggplot2
parlance for small multiplesggplot2
offers two functions for creating small multiples:
facet_wrap()
: define subsets as the levels of a single grouping variablefacet_grid()
: define subsets as the crossing of two grouping variablesThere are two problems here–there are too many states to distinguish each one by color, and the lines obscure one another.
We can remedy the deficiencies of the previous plot by faceting by state rather than mapping state to color.
There is also a facet_grid()
function for faceting in two dimensions.
The ggplot2
theme system handles non-data plot elements such as
Built-in themes include:
theme_gray()
(default)theme_bw()
theme_classc()
Specific theme elements can be overridden using theme()
. For example:
All theme options are documented in ?theme
.
You can create new themes, as in the following example:
theme_new <- theme_bw() +
theme(plot.background = element_rect(size = 1, color = "blue", fill = "black"),
text=element_text(size = 12, family = "Serif", color = "ivory"),
axis.text.y = element_text(colour = "purple"),
axis.text.x = element_text(colour = "red"),
panel.background = element_rect(fill = "pink"),
strip.background = element_rect(fill = muted("orange")))
p5 + theme_new
The most frequently asked question goes something like this: I have two variables in my data.frame, and I’d like to plot them as separate points, with different color depending on which variable it is. How do I do that?
Economist
Graph<images/Economist1.pdf>
Graph source: http://www.economist.com/node/21541178
Building off of the graphics you created in the previous exercises, put the finishing touches to make it as close as possible to the original economist graph.
Lets start by creating the basic scatter plot, then we can make a list of things that need to be added or changed. The basic plot loogs like this:
## Parsed with column specification:
## cols(
## Country = col_character(),
## HDI.Rank = col_integer(),
## HDI = col_double(),
## CPI = col_double(),
## Region = col_character()
## )
To complete this graph we need to:
Adding the trend line is not too difficult, though we need to guess at the model being displyed on the graph. A little bit of trial and error leads to
pc2 <- pc1 +
geom_smooth(mapping = aes(linetype = "r2"),
method = "lm",
formula = y ~ x + log(x), se = FALSE,
color = "red")
pc2 + geom_point()
Notice that we put the geom_line
layer first so that it will be plotted underneath the points, as was done on the original graph.
This one is a little tricky. We know that we can change the shape with the shape
argument, what what value do we set shape to? The example shown in ?shape
can help us:
## A look at all 25 symbols
df2 <- data.frame(x = 1:5 , y = 1:25, z = 1:25)
s <- ggplot(df2, aes(x = x, y = y))
s + geom_point(aes(shape = z), size = 4) + scale_shape_identity()
## While all symbols have a foreground colour, symbols 19-25 also take a
## background colour (fill)
s + geom_point(aes(shape = z), size = 4, colour = "Red") +
scale_shape_identity()
This shows us that shape 1 is an open circle, so
That is better, but unfortunately the size of the line around the points is much narrower than on the original.
This one is tricky in a couple of ways. First, there is no attribute in the data that separates points that should be labelled from points that should not be. So the first step is to identify those points.
pointsToLabel <- c("Russia", "Venezuela", "Iraq", "Myanmar", "Sudan",
"Afghanistan", "Congo", "Greece", "Argentina", "Brazil",
"India", "Italy", "China", "South Africa", "Spane",
"Botswana", "Cape Verde", "Bhutan", "Rwanda", "France",
"United States", "Germany", "Britain", "Barbados", "Norway", "Japan",
"New Zealand", "Singapore")
Now we can label these points using geom_text
, like this:
(pc4 <- pc3 +
geom_text(aes(label = Country),
color = "gray20",
data = filter(dat, Country %in% pointsToLabel)))
This more or less gets the information across, but the labels overlap in a most unpleasing fashion. We can use the ggrepel
package to make things better, but if you want perfection you will probably have to do some hand-adjustment.
library("ggrepel")
(pc4 <- pc3 +
geom_text_repel(aes(label = Country),
color = "gray20",
data = filter(dat, Country %in% pointsToLabel),
force = 10))
Thinkgs are starting to come together. There are just a couple more things we need to add, and then all that will be left are themeing changes.
Comparing our graph to the original we notice that the labels and order of the Regions in the color legend differ. To correct this we need to change both the labels and order of the Region variable. We can do this with the factor
function.
dat$Region <- factor(dat$Region,
levels = c("EU W. Europe",
"Americas",
"Asia Pacific",
"East EU Cemt Asia",
"MENA",
"SSA"),
labels = c("OECD",
"Americas",
"Asia &\nOceania",
"Central &\nEastern Europe",
"Middle East &\nnorth Africa",
"Sub-Saharan\nAfrica"))
Now when we construct the plot using these data the order should appear as it does in the original.
The next step is to add the title and format the axes. We do that using the scales
system in ggplot2.
library(grid)
(pc5 <- pc4 +
scale_x_continuous(name = "Corruption Perceptions Index, 2011 (10=least corrupt)",
limits = c(.9, 10.5),
breaks = 1:10) +
scale_y_continuous(name = "Human Development Index, 2011 (1=Best)",
limits = c(0.2, 1.0),
breaks = seq(0.2, 1.0, by = 0.1)) +
scale_color_manual(name = "",
values = c("#24576D",
"#099DD7",
"#28AADC",
"#248E84",
"#F2583F",
"#96503F")) +
ggtitle("Corruption and Human development"))
Our graph is almost there. To finish up, we need to adjust some of the theme elements, and label the axes and legends. This part usually involves some trial and error as you figure out where things need to be positioned. To see what these various theme settings do you can change them and observe the results.
library(grid) # for the 'unit' function
(pc6 <- pc5 +
theme_minimal() + # start with a minimal theme and add what we need
theme(text = element_text(color = "gray20"),
legend.position = c("top"), # position the legend in the upper left
legend.direction = "horizontal",
legend.justification = 0.1, # anchor point for legend.position.
legend.text = element_text(size = 11, color = "gray10"),
axis.text = element_text(face = "italic"),
axis.title.x = element_text(vjust = -1), # move title away from axis
axis.title.y = element_text(vjust = 2), # move away for axis
axis.ticks.y = element_blank(), # element_blank() is how we remove elements
axis.line = element_line(color = "gray40", size = 0.5),
axis.line.y = element_blank(),
panel.grid.major = element_line(color = "gray50", size = 0.5),
panel.grid.major.x = element_blank()
))
The last bit of information that we want to have on the graph is the variance explained by the model represented by the trend line. Lets fit that model and pull out the R2 first, then think about how to get it onto the graph.
mR2 <- summary(lm(HDI ~ CPI + log(CPI), data = dat))$r.squared
mR2 <- paste0(format(mR2, digits = 2), "%")
OK, now that we’ve calculated the values, let’s think about how to get them on the graph. ggplot2 has an annotate
function, but this is not convenient for adding elements outside the plot area. The grid
package has nice functions for doing this, so we’ll use those.
And here it is, our final version!
png(file = "images/econScatter10.png", width = 700, height = 500)
p <- ggplot(dat,
mapping = aes(x = CPI, y = HDI)) +
geom_smooth(mapping = aes(linetype = "r2"),
method = "lm",
formula = y ~ x + log(x), se = FALSE,
color = "red") +
geom_point(mapping = aes(color = Region),
shape = 1,
size = 4,
stroke = 1.5) +
geom_text_repel(mapping = aes(label = Country, alpha = labels),
color = "gray20",
data = transform(dat,
labels = Country %in% c("Russia",
"Venezuela",
"Iraq",
"Mayanmar",
"Sudan",
"Afghanistan",
"Congo",
"Greece",
"Argentinia",
"Italy",
"Brazil",
"India",
"China",
"South Africa",
"Spain",
"Cape Verde",
"Bhutan",
"Rwanda",
"France",
"Botswana",
"France",
"US",
"Germany",
"Britain",
"Barbados",
"Japan",
"Norway",
"New Zealand",
"Sigapore"))) +
scale_x_continuous(name = "Corruption Perception Index, 2011 (10=least corrupt)",
limits = c(1.0, 10.0),
breaks = 1:10) +
scale_y_continuous(name = "Human Development Index, 2011 (1=best)",
limits = c(0.2, 1.0),
breaks = seq(0.2, 1.0, by = 0.1)) +
scale_color_manual(name = "",
values = c("#24576D",
"#099DD7",
"#28AADC",
"#248E84",
"#F2583F",
"#96503F"),
guide = guide_legend(nrow = 1, order=1)) +
scale_alpha_discrete(range = c(0, 1),
guide = FALSE) +
scale_linetype(name = "",
breaks = "r2",
labels = list(bquote(R^2==.(mR2))),
guide = guide_legend(override.aes = list(linetype = 1, size = 2, color = "red"), order=2)) +
ggtitle("Corruption and human development") +
labs(caption="Sources: Transparency International; UN Human Development Report") +
theme_bw() +
theme(panel.border = element_blank(),
panel.grid = element_blank(),
panel.grid.major.y = element_line(color = "gray"),
text = element_text(color = "gray20"),
axis.title.x = element_text(face="italic"),
axis.title.y = element_text(face="italic"),
legend.position = "top",
legend.direction = "horizontal",
legend.box = "horizontal",
legend.text = element_text(size = 12),
plot.caption = element_text(hjust=0),
plot.title = element_text(size = 16, face = "bold"))
## Warning: Using alpha for a discrete variable is not advised.
## png
## 2
Comparing it to the original suggests that we’ve got most of the important elements.