Introduction to ggplot2

## Agenda

• understand the philosophy of Grammar of Graphics
• explore different aspects of ggplot2
• learn to build some of the basic plots regularly used for exploring data

## Introduction

ggplot2 is an awesome alternative to base R for data visualization. It is based on The Grammar of Graphics. In this post, we will understand the philosophy behind ggplot2 and learn to build some of the most frequently used plots for visualizing data.

### Grammar of Graphics

Grammar of Graphics is a formal system for building plots. The core idea is that any plot can be uniquely described as a combination of

• a dataset
• a geom
• a set of mappings
• a statistic
• a coordinate system
• a faceting scheme

## Data

Let us build a scatter plot from scratch using the mtcars data. We will build the plot incrementally and understand the above layers. The first step in any data visualization exercise is to identify the data set. In ggplot2, we can specify the data set using ggplot().

ggplot(data = mtcars) 

If you observe, ggplot() does not generate any plot, it just creates a coordinate system.

## Geom

After specifying the data set, we have to decide how the data will be visualized. We will do this using geoms. It basically details the geometric shapes that must be used to display the data. In our case, we want the data to displayed as points.

There are several geoms and we will explore them one by one. For the time time being, let us use geom_point(). This tells ggplot2 it must use points to represent the data. The next step is to specify the variables that will be represented by the X and Y axis. To do this we will use mapping and aes.

aes is the short for aesthetics. Using mapping, we can map variables to aesthetics. We specify the aesthetic type and the corresponding variable within aes.In our example, we want the X axis to be represented by disp and Y axis by mpg. ggplot2 will search for these variables in the data we have provided in ggplot which is mtcars. If ggplot2 can’t find the variables, it will return an error.

So far we have provided:

• data set
• geometric shape to represent data
• variables to represent X and Y axis

The above layers are the bare minimum required to create a plot in ggplot2.

ggplot(data = mtcars) +
geom_point(mapping = aes(x = disp, y = mpg))

## Aesthetics

What are aesthetics?

• x
• y
• shape
• size
• color
• fill
• alpha
• linetype

Aestheics are the visual properties of the objects in the plot. We can display the geometric object in different ways by changing the values of its aesthetic properties.

### Color

ggplot(data = mtcars) +
geom_point(mapping = aes(x = disp, y = mpg, color = cyl))

### Shape

ggplot(data = mtcars) +
geom_point(mapping = aes(x = disp, y = mpg, shape = gear))

### Size

ggplot(data = mtcars) +
geom_point(mapping = aes(x = disp, y = mpg, size = hp))

## Stat

Some graphs plot the raw data set, but others like bar plot, box plot and histograms compute new values and plot them. In this section, we will look at how the data is transformed.

• stat_count
• stat_boxplot
• stat_bin
• stat_summary

## Position

• position_dodge
• position_identity
• position_jitter
• position_fill

## Coordinate System

Default is the cartesian coordinate system.

• coord_flip
• coord_polar

## Facet

• facet_grid
• facet_wrap