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

Crafting simple violin plots


To visualize data and its distribution format, violin plots may be the way to go. Some data scientists love them, others hate. Still they play a role of major importance in data visualization and it's good to know how to brew them and the whole utility belt that comes along. There are alternatives though, as we are going to discuss later.

Again, until first half of 2017, both ggvis and plotly R's libraries does not dispose of a dedicated functions and types to draw violin plots, thus making relatively difficult to obtain such a viz using those packages. ggplot2 has a fully dedicated function, geom_violin(). Current recipe is teaching how to use this function. Make sure to have car package installed.

How to do it...

Let's get started with the recipe:

  1. Draw the base aesthetics under an object:
> library(ggplot2)
> base <-ggplot(car::Salaries, 
                aes(x = rank, y = salary))
  1. Call geom_violin() to draw a simple violin plot:
> base + geom_violin()

Following...