ggplot facet_wrap with equally spaced axes

Question

Say I have the following dummy data frame:

df <- data.frame(let = LETTERS[1:13], value = sample(13), 
group = rep(c("foo", "bar"), times = c(5,8)))

df
  let value group
1    A     2   foo
2    B     1   foo
3    C    12   foo
4    D     8   foo
5    E     4   foo
6    F    13   bar
7    G    11   bar
8    H     3   bar
9    I     7   bar
10   J     5   bar
11   K    10   bar
12   L     9   bar
13   M     6   bar

Using ggplot with facet_wrap allows me to make a panel for each of the groups...

library(ggplot2)
ggplot(df, aes(x= let, y = value)) + 
geom_point() + 
coord_flip() +
facet_wrap(~group, scales = "free")

..but the vertical axes are not equally spaced, i.e. the left plot contains more vertical ticks than the right one. I would like to fill up the right vertical axis with (unlabeled) ticks (with no plotted values). In this case that would add 3 empty ticks, but it should be scalable to any df size.

What is the best way to accomplish this? Should I change the data frame, or is there a way to do this using ggplot?

Answer 1

A cludgy solution that requires magrittr (for the compound assignment pipe %<>%):

df %<>% 
  rbind(data.frame(let = c(" ", "  ", "   "), 
                   value = NA, 
                   group = "foo"))

I just add three more entries for foo that are blank strings (i.e., just spaces) of different lengths. There must be a more elegant solution, though.

Answer 2

I’m not sure why you want to arrange the categorical variable on your chart as you do other than aesthetics (it does seem to look better). At any rate, a simple workaround which seems to handle general cases is to note that ggplot uses a numerical scale to plot categorical variables. The workaround for your chart is then for each x value to plot a transparent point at the y value equal to the number of categorical variables. Points are plotted for all x values as a simple solution to the case of non-overlapping ranges of x values for each group. I've added another group to your data frame to make the example a bit more general.

library(ggplot2)
set.seed(123)
df <- data.frame(let = LETTERS[1:19], value = c(sample(13),20+sample(6)), 
             group = rep(c("foo", "bar", "bar2"), times = c(5,8,6)))
num_rows <- xtabs(~ group, df)
max_rows <- max(num_rows)

sp <- ggplot(df, aes(y= let, x = value)) + 
      geom_point() + 
      geom_point(aes(y = max_rows +.5), alpha=0 ) +
      facet_wrap(~group, scales = "free", nrow=1 )
plot(sp)

This gives the following chart:

Answer 3

Use free_x instead of free, like this:

ggplot(df, aes(x= let, y = value)) + 
  geom_point() + 
  coord_flip() +
  facet_wrap(~group, scales = "free_x")+
  theme(axis.text.y=element_blank(),
        axis.ticks.y=element_blank())