Constructing a fan plot
Fan plots are very similar to pie charts; the different sectors/slices in a fan plot overlap. The slice with the highest value is placed at the back and subsequent slices are plotted on top of it. In our example, Army has the highest percentage, followed by Marines, Air Force, and Navy. Note that Air Force and Navy overlap each other as the values are very close.
Getting ready
To construct a fan plot, we use the following two packages:
plotrixRColorBrewer
How to do it…
The fan plot is implemented using the plotrix package; hence we need to install and load this in our R session. We have used the colors from RColorBrewer and hence we also need to load it in R.
The data and labels vectors, as well as the paste() function, are discussed in detail under the recipe Generating a simple pie chart in this chapter. We use the fan.plot() function to construct the fan plot in R.
data = c(179718,41370,41914,44280)
pct = (data/sum(data))*100
pct = round(pct,2)
labels = c("Army",...