Time series axis changes in R

Question

I have the following data frame:

head(DWPhyto)
# A tibble: 6 x 2
        date  data
      <date> <int>
1 2008-10-13   200
2 2009-03-25   200
3 2009-05-03   200
4 2009-05-13   200
5 2009-07-20   200
6 2009-12-22   200

str(DWPhyto)
Classes ‘tbl_df’, ‘tbl’ and 'data.frame':   1364 obs. of  2 variables:
 $ date: Date, format: "2008-10-13" "2009-03-25" ...
 $ data: int  200 200 200 200 200 200 200 200 200 200 ...

When I plot it in ggplot I get a time series of data by time across years 2008-2017 with the following code:

ggplot(DWPhyto, aes(date, data)) +
  geom_line()

However, I want to split it up into singular years at a time, but when I do by setting xlim() it doesnt change the time series, but it removes the values on the x axis, how do you split it by year? Also once I split it into one year time frames, I want to add labels for each month of the year, but my dataset doesnt have regular sampling dates or sampling frequencies within each month period.

Is this possible?

Have you tried scale_x_date? Also post sample data per this guide stackoverflow.com/questions/5963269/… — Tung
When I use scale_x_date, it makes my labels more descriptive - adds year and month, but doesn't change the time series, nor add labels for months within years. — Brad Skelton
When I facet wrap by year, I get the following error: Error in combine_vars(data, params$plot_env, vars, drop = params$drop) : At least one layer must contain all variables used for facetting — Brad Skelton

Marco Marco · Accepted Answer · 2018-01-08T23:03:25

Here an example to handle the limits and the labels with pretty_breaks():

begining<-as.Date("1995-01-01")
end<- as.Date("1996-01-01")

recordspan  <-c(c(begining, end)) 

ggplot(DWPhyto) +
    geom_line(aes(x=date, y=data), size=0.1) +
    scale_y_continuous(name= "Text of variable y [units]")+
    scale_x_date(breaks=pretty_breaks(),limits=recordspan)+
    theme_bw()

Time series axis changes in R

1 Answers