how to plot time series with x axis ticks in month-year format in ggplot

Question

How to plot the data below in ggplot with x axis to show ticks in format as 'Jan-99'.

My data is as below:

head(rates,10)

    Month Repo_Rate
1  Apr-01      9.00
2  May-01      8.75
3  Jun-01      8.50
4  Jul-01      8.50
5  Aug-01      8.50
6  Sep-01      8.50
7  Oct-01      8.50
8  Nov-01      8.50
9  Dec-01      8.50
10 Jan-02      8.50

sapply(rates,class)

#  Month   Repo_Rate 
# "character"   "numeric"

I have done the plotting using xts/zoo/ts packages but would like to do using ggplot as this gives my publication quality figures.

Well first thing you nedd to do is convert your character vector to date format... see ?as.Date, and perhaps stackoverflow.com/questions/6242955/…. Then plotting should be straight forward. stackoverflow.com/questions/26458822/… , stackoverflow.com/questions/10576095/…, and lots more examples on SO — user20650
Can you check the update by @G.Grothendieck on your previous post with ggplot. — akrun

Shiva Prakash Shiva Prakash · Accepted Answer · 2015-11-14T07:14:04

you can try the following:

rates$date <- as.character(rates$month, stringAsFactors = FALSE)
rates$date <- as.Date(rates$date, "%B-%d") 

# Now plot the graph #######

ggplot(rates)+
  geom_line(aes(x=date, y= Repo_Rate))+
  scale_x_date(labels = date_format("%B-%d))

In any case if you need to change the date format please refer to : "http://docs.ggplot2.org/current/scale_date.html"

how to plot time series with x axis ticks in month-year format in ggplot

1 Answers