Book Image

R Data Visualization Recipes

By : Vitor Bianchi Lanzetta
Book Image

R Data Visualization Recipes

By: Vitor Bianchi Lanzetta

Overview of this book

R is an open source language for data analysis and graphics that allows users to load various packages for effective and better data interpretation. Its popularity has soared in recent years because of its powerful capabilities when it comes to turning different kinds of data into intuitive visualization solutions. This book is an update to our earlier R data visualization cookbook with 100 percent fresh content and covering all the cutting edge R data visualization tools. This book is packed with practical recipes, designed to provide you with all the guidance needed to get to grips with data visualization using R. It starts off with the basics of ggplot2, ggvis, and plotly visualization packages, along with an introduction to creating maps and customizing them, before progressively taking you through various ggplot2 extensions, such as ggforce, ggrepel, and gganimate. Using real-world datasets, you will analyze and visualize your data as histograms, bar graphs, and scatterplots, and customize your plots with various themes and coloring options. The book also covers advanced visualization aspects such as creating interactive dashboards using Shiny By the end of the book, you will be equipped with key techniques to create impressive data visualizations with professional efficiency and precision.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Creating simple raster plots with ggplot2


Raster plots can be seen as optimized tile plots. By adopting this geometry, there is no need to pick the binwidth argument. This makes the plot brewing process easier sometimes. It may be faster than brewing tiles while it also produces a smaller output when saved to PDF.

The ggplot2documentation considers raster geometry as a high performance special case when all tiles are the same size. This recipe demonstrates how to craft a simple raster plot with ggplot2. Using the car data set, a third variable will be computed by the stat_density_2d() function and then used to fill the raster. Explanations are highlighting alternative functions.

How to do it...

Here is how we proceed with the recipe:

  1. To simultaneously compute ..density.. and plot a raster, use stat_density_2d():
> library(ggplot2)
> ggplot(data = cars, aes(x = speed, y = dist)) + 
   stat_density_2d(aes(fill = ..density..),
                   geom = 'raster', contour = F)

Result looks like...