How to show a hierarchical structure on the axis labels with ggplot2?

7
votes

I would like to create a plot like this with ggplot2: Barplot with hierarchical labels on the x axis

(I made a small error here that caused not all labels to show up. obviously I do want all labels to show up :) ) However, my Google search didn't turn up anything. The closest I got was with barNest from plotrix, however, I don't like the quality of the graphs that are produced. The ggplot2 ones look a lot better.

In the ideal case, I would have expected to be able to do something like this: scale_x_discrete("Axis Title", labels=Level1+Level2+Level3) And then Level1, Level2 and Level3 would have been columns of the data frame that was used in the qplot function. If I can get this to work, I want to create a function to add this type of functionality to the scales function. Maybe scale_x_hierarchical would be better. Similar data can be generated with the following code:

data <- data.frame(
  Subject = c(rep(1, 48), rep(2, 48), rep(3, 48), rep(4, 48)), 
  month = rep(c(rep(1, 12), rep(4, 12), rep(7, 12), rep(10, 12)), 4), 
  day = rep(c(rep(1, 4), rep(11, 4), rep(21, 4)), 16), 
  hour = rep(c(0, 6, 12, 18), 48), 
  data = rnorm(192))

By the way, the image used here is created with Spotfire.

1
rggplot2
This is an abomination of a plot and I hope there isn't a way of doing it in ggplot. (Paraphrasing Hadley's response to another question.) But seriously, this plot doesn't do it for me. Use facets instead. – Andrie
Are you married to doing it in ggplot2 for some reason? This looks like a job for base graphics. It also looks like a good time to rethink how you're plotting your data moreso than what software to use. – John
Could you provide us with some data? – Brandon Bertelsen
@Andrie: You might think it is an abomination, others really like it. I don't think facets will work with four nested levels? @John: no not married to ggplot2, but I really like the looks and the way it builds up a graph. @Brandon Bertelsen: I have added a bit a R to create a sample data set. – wligtenberg
Can you really fit 192 hour labels into a single row and still have it readable? Each one or two digit number would have to be about the width of each bar. – Henry

1 Answers

1
votes

It's a little different, but the LearnR blog has a post on linking a table to a graph so that it looks like this:

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