R package numbr 0.11.3 posted

My simple package of useful numeric functions, numbr, has been updated to version 0.11.3 and posted to GitHub. You can install it with the command

devtools::install_github("tomhopper/numbr")


0.11.3 adds the %==% operator. %==% implements the base R function all.equal(), comparing two numeric or integer vectors for near-equality. Unlike all.equal, %==% returns a vector for every element of the left-hand and right-hand sides. This makes it useful in functions like which or dplyr::filter.

I use %==% when making comparisons between columns of a data frame that have been calculated and may have differences due to machine accuracy errors.

%==% currently uses the defaults for other parameters to all.equal (most notably tolerance), and no method is implemented to alter those parameters in this version.

Full documentation of the functions in numbr can be found at tomhopper/numbr.

Understanding Data

When analyzing data, I have often found it useful to think of the data as being one of four main types, according to the typology proposed by Stevens.[1] Different types of data have certain characteristics; understanding what type of data you have helps with selecting the analysis to perform perform while preventing basic mistakes.

The types, or “scales of measurement,” are:

Nominal
Data identifying unique classifications or objects where the order of values is not meaningful. Examples include zip codes, gender, nationality, sports teams and multiple choice answers on a test.
Ordinal
Data where the order is important but the difference or distance between items is not important or not measured. Examples include team rankings in sport (team A is better than team B, but how much better is open to debate), scales such as health (e.g. “healthy” to “sick”), ranges of opinion (e.g. “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree” or “on a scale of 1 to 10”) and Intelligence Quotient.
Interval
Numeric data identified by values where the degree of difference between items is significant and meaningful, but their ratio is not. Common examples are dates—we can say 2000 CE is 1000CE + 1000 years, but 1000 CE is not half of 2000 CE in any meaningful way—and temperatures on the Celsius and Fahrenheit scales, where a difference of 10° is meaningful, but 10° is not twice as hot as 5°.
Ratio
Numeric data where the ratio between numbers is meaningful. Usually, such scales have a meaningful “0.” Examples include length, mass, velocity, acceleration, voltage, power, duration, energy and Kelvin-scale temperature.

The generally-appropriate statistics and mathematical operations for each type are summarized in table 1.

Table 1: Scales of measurement and allowed statistical and mathematical operations.
Scale Type Statistics Operations
Nominal mode, frequency, chi-squared, cluster analysis =, ≠
Ordinal above, plus: median, non-parametric tests, Kruskal-Wallis, rank-correlation =, ≠, >, <
Interval plus: arithmetic mean, some parametric tests, correlation, regression, ANOVA (sometimes), factor analysis =, ≠, >, <, +, –
Ratio plus: geometric and harmonic mean, ANOVA, regression, correlation coefficient =, ≠, >, <, +, -, ×, ÷

While this is a useful typology for most use, and certainly for initial consideration, there are valid criticisms of Stevens’ typology. For example, percentages and count data have some characteristics of ratio-scale data, but with additional constraints. e.g. the average of the counts $\overline{(2, 2, 1)} = 1.66\ldots$ may not be meaningful. This typology is a useful thinking tool, but it is essential to understand the statistical methods being applied and their sensitivity to departures from underlying assumptions.

Types of data in R

R[2] recognizes at least fifteen different types of data. Several of these are related to identifying functions and other objects—most users don’t need to worry about most of them. The main types that industrial engineers and scientists will need to use are:

numeric
Real numbers. Also known as double, real and single (note that R stores all real numbers in double-precision). May be used for all scales of measurement, but is particularly suited to ratio scale measurements.
complex
Imaginary real numbers can be manipulated directly as a data type using

x <- 1 + i2

or

x <- complex(real=1, imaginary=2)

Like type numeric, may be used for all scales of measurement.

integer
Stores integers only, without any decimal point. Can be used mainly for ordinal or interval data, but may be used as ratio data—such as counts—with some caution.
logical
Stores Boolean values of TRUE or FALSE, typically used as nominal data.
character
Stores text strings and can be used as nominal or ordinal data.

Types of variables in R

The above types of data can be stored in several types, or structures, of variables. The equivalent to a variable in Excel would be rows, columns or tables of data. The main ones that we will use are:

vector
Contains one or many elements, and behaves like a column or row of data. Vectors can contain any of the above types of data but each vector is stored, or encoded, as a single type. The vector

c(1, 2, 1, 3, 4)
## [1] 1 2 1 3 4

is, by default, a numeric vector of type double, but

c(1, 2, 1, 3, 4, "name")
## [1] "1" "2" "1" "3" "4" "name"

will be a character vector, or a vector where all data is stored as type character, and the numbers will be stored as characters rather than numbers. It will not be possible to perform mathematical operations on these numbers-stored-as-characters without first converting them to type numeric.

factor
A special type of character vector, where the text strings signify factor levels and are encoded internally as integer counts of the occurrence of each factor. Factors can be treated as nominal data when the order does not matter, or as ordinal data when the order does matter.
factor(c("a", "b", "c", "a"), levels=c("a","b","c","d"))
## [1] a b c a
## Levels: a b c d
array
A generalization of vectors from one dimension to two or more dimensions. Array dimensions must be pre-defined and can have any number of dimensions. Like vectors, all elements of an array must be of the same data type. (Note that the letters object used in the example below is a variable supplied by R that contains the letters a through z.)

# letters a - c in 2x4 array
array(data=letters[1:3], dim=c(2,4))
##      [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4]
## [1,] "a"  "c"  "b"  "a"
## [2,] "b"  "a"  "c"  "b"

# numbers 1 - 3 in 2x4 array
array(data=1:3, dim=c(2,4))
##      [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4]
## [1,]    1    3    2    1
## [2,]    2    1    3    2
matrix
A special type of array with the properties of a mathematical matrix. It may only be two-dimensional, having rows and columns, where all columns must have the same type of data and every column must have the same number of rows. R provides several functions specific to manipulating matrices, such as taking the transpose, performing matrix multiplication and calculation eigenvectors and eigenvalues.

matrix(data = rep(1:3, times=2), nrow=2, ncol=3)
##      [,1] [,2] [,3]
## [1,]    1    3    2
## [2,]    2    1    3
list
Vectors whose elements are other R objects, where each object of the list can be of a different data type, and each object can be of different length and dimension than the other objects. Lists can therefore store all other data types, including other lists.

list("text", "more", 2, c(1,2,3,2))
## [[1]]
## [1] "text"
##
## [[2]]
## [1] "more"
##
## [[3]]
## [1] 2
##
## [[4]]
## [1] 1 2 3 2
data.frame
For most industrial and data scientists, data frames are the most widely useful type of variable. A data.frame is the list analog to the matrix: it is an $m \times n$ list where all columns must be vectors of the same number of rows (determined with NROW()). However, unlike matrices, different columns can contain different types of data and each row and column must have a name. If not named explicitly, R names rows by their row number and columns according to the data assigned assigned to the column. Data frames are typically used to store the sort of data that industrial engineers and scientists most often work with, and is the closest analog in R to an Excel spreadsheet. Usually data frames are made up of one or more columns of factors and one or more columns of numeric data.

data.frame(rnorm(5), rnorm(5), rnorm(5))
##     rnorm.5.  rnorm.5..1  rnorm.5..2
## 1  0.2939566  1.28985202 -0.01669957
## 2  0.3672161 -0.01663912 -1.02064116
## 3  1.0871615  1.13855476  0.78573775
## 4 -0.8501263 -0.17928722  1.03848796
## 5 -1.6409403 -0.34025455 -0.62113545

More generally, in R all variables are objects, and R distinguishes between objects by their internal storage type and by their class declaration, which are accessible via the typeof() and class() functions. Functions in R are also objects, and the users can define new objects to control the output from functions like summary() and print(). For more on objects, types and classes, see section 2 of the R Language Definition.

Table 2 summarizes the internal storage and R classes of the main data and variable types.

Table 2: Table of R data and variable types.
Variable type Storage type Class Measurement Scale
vector of decimals double numeric ratio
vector of integers integer integer ratio or interval
vector of complex complex complex ratio
vector of characters character character nominal
factor vector integer factor nominal or ordinal
matrix of decimals double matrix ratio
data frame list data.frame mixed
list list list mixed

References

1. Stevens, S. S. “On the Theory of Scales of Measurement.” Science. 103.2684 (1946): 677-680. Print.
2. R Core Team (2017). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. URL https://www.R-project.org/.

Introduction to R for Excel Users

As the saying goes, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Excel was designed to do simple financial analyses and to craft financial statements. Though its capabilities have been expanded over the years, it was never designed to perform the sort of data analysis that industry scientists, engineers and Six Sigma belts need to perform on a daily basis.

Most data analyses performed in Excel look more like simple financial spreadsheets rather than actual data analysis, and this quality of work translates into bad—or at least sub-optimal—business decisions. There are alternatives to Excel, and the free, open-source data analysis platform R is one of them.

Unfortunately, R has a steep learning curve. I’m offering, for free, a short primer on R [PDF] where I’ve sought to make that learning curve a little less painful for engineers and scientists who normally work in Excel.

Background

A couple of years ago, I was developing a short course to teach R to scientists and engineers in industry who normally used Excel. The goal was to help them transition to a more capable tool. My course design notes morphed into a handout, and when plans for the course fell through, that handout grew into a self-study guide, which I later adapted into this seventy-page, stand-alone introduction for Excel users.

Organization

The primer walks the reader through the basics of R, starting with a brief overview of capabilities, then diving into installation, basic operations, graphical analysis and basic statistics. I believe that a picture is worth a thousand words, so it’s light on text and heavy on examples and visuals.

The end of the book rounds out with a look at some of the most useful add-ons, the briefest of introductions to writing your own, custom functions in R, and a cross-reference of common Excel functions with their equivalents in R.

The text is broken up into chapters and fully indexed so that it can be used either as a walk-through tutorial or as a quick reference.

Aside

Update to plot.qcc using ggplot2 and grid

Two years ago, I blogged about my experience rewriting the plot.qcc() function in the qcc package to use ggplot2 and grid. My goal was to allow manipulation of qcc’s quality control plots using grid graphics, especially to combine range charts with their associated individuals or moving range charts, as these two diagnostic tools should be used together. At the time, I posted the code on my GitHub.

I recently discovered that the update to ggplot2 v2.0 broke my code, so that attempting to generate a qcc plot would throw an obscure error from someplace deep in ggplot2. The fix turned out to be pretty easy. The original code used aes_string() instead of aes() because of a barely-documented problem of calling aes() inside a function. It looks like this has been quietly corrected with ggplot2 2.0, and aes_string() is no longer needed for this.

The updated code is up on GitHub. As before, load the qcc library, then source() qcc.plot.R. For the rest of the current session, calls to qcc() will automatically use the new plot.qcc() function.

Explorable, multi-tabbed reports in R and Shiny

Matt Parker recently showed us how to create multi-tab reports with R and jQuery UI. His example was absurdly easy to reproduce; it was a great blog post.

I have been teaching myself Shiny in fits and starts, and I decided to attempt to reproduce Matt’s jQuery UI example in Shiny. You can play with the app on shinyapps.io, and the complete project is up on Github. The rest of this post walks through how I built the Shiny app.

It’s a demo

The result demonstrates a few Shiny and ggplot2 techniques that will be useful in other projects, including:

• Creating tabbed reports in Shiny, with different interactive controls or widgets associated with each tab;
• Combining different ggplot2 scale changes in a single legend;
• Sorting a data frame so that categorical labels in a legend are ordered to match the position of numerical data on a plot;
• Borrowing from Matt’s work,
• Summarizing and plotting data using dplyr and ggplot2;
• Limiting display of categories in a graph legend to the top n (selectable by the user), with remaining values listed as “other;”
• Coloring only the top n categories on a graph, and making all other categories gray;
• Changing line weight for the top n categories on a graph, and making;

Obtaining the data

As with Matt’s original report, the data can be downloaded from the CDC WONDER database by selecting “Data Request” under “current cases.”

To get the same data that I’ve used, group results by “state” and by “year,” check “incidence rate per 100,000” and, near the bottom, “export results.” Uncheck “show totals,” then submit the request. This will download a .txt tab-delimited data file, which in this app I read in using read_tsv() from the readr package.

Looking at Matt’s example, his “top 5” states look suspiciously like the most populous states. He’s used total count of cases, which will be biased toward more populous states and doesn’t tell us anything interesting. When examining occurrences—whether disease, crime or defects—we have to look at the rates rather than total counts; we can only make meaningful comparisons and make useful decisions from an examination of the rates.

Setup

As always, we need to load our libraries into R. For this example, I use readr, dplyr, ggplot2 and RColorBrewer.

The UI

The app generates three graphs: a national total, that calculates national rates from the state values; a combined state graph that highlights the top $n$ states, where the user chooses $n$; and a graph that displays individual state data, where the user can select the state to view. Each goes on its own tab.

ui.R contains the code to create a tabset panel with three tab panels.

tabsetPanel(
tabPanel("National", fluidRow(plotOutput("nationPlot"))),
tabPanel("By State",
fluidRow(plotOutput("statePlot"),
wellPanel(
sliderInput(inputId = "nlabels",
label = "Top n States:",
min = 1,
max = 10,
value = 6,
step = 1)
)
)
),
tabPanel("State Lookup",
fluidRow(plotOutput("iStatePlot"),
wellPanel(
htmlOutput("selectState"))
)
)
)


Each panel contains a fluidRow element to ensure consistent alignment of graphs across tabs, and on tabs where I want both a graph and controls, fluidRow() is used to add the controls below the graph. The controls are placed inside a wellPanel() so that they are visually distinct from the graph.

Because I wanted to populate a selection menu (selectInput()) from the data frame, I created the selection menu in server.R and then displayed it in the third tab panel set using the htmlOutput() function.

The graphs

The first two graphs are very similar to Matt’s example. For the national rates, the only change is the use of rates rather than counts.

df_tb <- read_tsv("../data/OTIS 2013 TB Data.txt", n_max = 1069, col_types = "-ciiii?di")

df_tb %>%
group_by(Year) %>%
summarise(n_cases = sum(Count), pop = sum(Population), us_rate = (n_cases / pop * 100000)) %>%
ggplot(aes(x = Year, y = us_rate)) +
geom_line() +
labs(x = "Year Reported",
y = "TB Cases per 100,000 residents",
title = "Reported Active Tuberculosis Cases in the U.S.") +
theme_minimal()


The main trick, here, is the use of dplyr to summarize the data across states. Since we can’t just sum or average rates to get the combined rate, we have to sum all of the state counts and populations for each year, and add another column for the calculated national rate.

To create a graph that highlights the top $n$ states, we generate a data frame with one variable, State, that contains the top $n$ states. This is, again, almost a direct copy of Matt’s code with changes to make the graph interactive within Shiny. This code goes inside of the shinyServer() block so that it will update when the user selects a different value for $n$. Instead of hard-coding $n$, there’s a Shiny input slider named nlabels. With a list of the top $n$ states ordered by rate of TB cases, df_tb is updated with a new field containing the top $n$ state names and “Other” for all other states.

top_states <- df_tb %>%
filter(Year == 2013) %>%
arrange(desc(Rate)) %>%
slice(1:input$nlabels) %>% select(State) df_tb$top_state <- factor(df_tb$State, levels = c(top_states$State, "Other"))
df_tb$top_state[is.na(df_tb$top_state)] <- "Other"


The plot is generated from the newly-organized data frame. Where Matt’s example has separate legends for line weight (size) and color, I’ve had ggplot2 combine these into a single legend by passing the same value to the “guide =” argument in the scale_XXX_manual() calls. The colors and line sizes also have to be updated dynamically for the selected $n$.

    df_tb %>%
ggplot() +
labs(x = "Year reported",
y = "TB Cases per 100,000 residents",
title = "Reported Active Tuberculosis Cases in the U.S.") +
theme_minimal() +
geom_line(aes(x = Year, y = Rate, group = State, colour = top_state, size = top_state)) +
scale_colour_manual(values = c(brewer.pal(n = input$nlabels, "Paired"), "grey"), guide = guide_legend(title = "State")) + scale_size_manual(values = c(rep(1,input$nlabels), 0.5), guide = guide_legend(title = "State"))
})

})


The last graph is nearly a copy of the national totals graph, except that it is filtered for the state selected in the drop-down menu control. The menu is as selectInput() control.

renderUI({
selectInput(inputId = "state", label = "Which state?", choices = unique(df_tb$State), selected = "Alabama", multiple = FALSE) })  With a state selected, the data is filtered by the selected state and TB rates are plotted. df_tb %>% filter(State == input$state) %>%
ggplot() +
labs(x = "Year reported",
y = "TB Cases per 100,000 residents",
title = "Reported Active Tuberculosis Cases in the U.S.") +
theme_minimal() +
geom_line(aes(x = Year, y = Rate))


Wrap up

I want to thank Matt Parker for his original example. It was well-written, clear and easy to reproduce.

Can We do Better than R-squared?

If you're anything like me, you've used Excel to plot data, then used the built-in “add fitted line” feature to overlay a fitted line to show the trend, and displayed the “goodness of fit,” the r-squared (R2) value, on the chart by checking the provided box in the chart dialog.

The R2 calculated in Excel is often used as a measure of how well a model explains a response variable, so that “R2 = 0.8” is interpreted as “80% of the variation in the 'y' variable is explained by my model.” I think that the ease with which the R2 value can be calculated and added to a plot is one of the reasons for its popularity.

There's a hidden trap, though. R2 will increase as you add terms to a model, even if those terms offer no real explanatory power. By using the R2 that Excel so helpfully provides, we can fool ourselves into believing that a model is better than it is.

Below I'll demonstrate this and show an alternative that can be implemented easily in R.

Some data to work with

First, let's create a simple, random data set, with factors a, b, c and response variable y.

head(my.df)

##       y a       b      c
## 1 2.189 1 -1.2935 -0.126
## 2 3.912 2 -0.4662  1.623
## 3 4.886 3  0.1338  2.865
## 4 5.121 4  1.2945  4.692
## 5 4.917 5  0.1178  5.102
## 6 4.745 6  0.4045  5.936


Here is what this data looks like:

Calculating R-squared

What Excel does when it displays the R2 is create a linear least-squares model, which in R looks something like:

my.lm <- lm(y ~ a + b + c, data = my.df)


Excel also does this when we call RSQ() in a worksheet. In fact, we can do this explicitly in Excel using the Regression analysis option in the Analysis Pack add-on, but I don't know many people who use this, and Excel isn't known for its reliability in producing good output from the Analysis Pack.

In R, we can obtain R2 via the summary() function on a linear model.

summary(my.lm)

##
## Call:
## lm(formula = y ~ a + b + c, data = my.df)
##
## Residuals:
##     Min      1Q  Median      3Q     Max
## -1.2790 -0.6006  0.0473  0.5177  1.5299
##
## Coefficients:
##             Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(&gt;|t|)
## (Intercept)    2.080      0.763    2.72    0.034 *
## a             -0.337      0.776   -0.43    0.679
## b             -0.489      0.707   -0.69    0.515
## c              1.038      0.817    1.27    0.250
## ---
## Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1
##
## Residual standard error: 1.1 on 6 degrees of freedom
## Multiple R-squared:  0.833,  Adjusted R-squared:  0.75
## F-statistic:   10 on 3 and 6 DF,  p-value: 0.00948


Since summary() produces a list object as output, we can grab just the R2 value.

summary(my.lm)$r.squared  ## [1] 0.8333  Normally, we would (somewhat loosely) interpret this as telling us that about 83% of the variation in the response y is explained by the model. Notice that there is also an "adjusted r-squared” value given by summary(). This tells us that only 75% of the variation is explained by the model. Which is right? The problem with R-squared Models that have many terms will always give higher R2 values, just because more terms will slightly improve the model fit to the given data. The unadjusted R2 is wrong. The calculation for adjusted R2 is intended to partially compensate for that “overfit,” so it's better. It's nice that R shows us both values, and a pity that Excel won't show the adjusted value. The only way to get an adjusted R2 in Excel is to run the Regression analysis; otherwise, we have to calculate adjusted R2 manually. Both R2 and adjusted R2 are measures of how well the model explains the given data. However, in industry we usually want to know something a little different. We don't build regression models to explain only the data we have; we build them to think about future results. We want R2 to tell us how well the model predicts the future. That is, we want a predictive R2. Minitab has added the ability to calculate predictive R2 in Minitab 17, and has a nice blog post explaining this statistic. Calcuting predictive R-squared Neither R nor Excel provide a means of calculating the predictive R2 within the default functions. While some free R add-on packages provide this ability (DAAG, at least), we can easily do it ourselves. We'll need a linear model, created with lm(), for the residuals so we can calculate the “PRESS” statistic, and then we need the sum of squares of the terms so we can calculate a predictive R2. Since the predictive R2 depends entirely on the PRESS statistic, we could skip the added work of calculating predictive R2 and just use PRESS, as some authors advocate. The lower the PRESS, the better the model is at fitting future data from the same process, so we can use PRESS to compare different models. Personally, I'm used to thinking in terms of R2, and I like having the ability to compare to the old R2 statistic that I'm familiar with. To calculate PRESS, first we calculate the predictive residuals, then take the sum of squares (thanks to (Walker’s helpful blog post) for this). This is pretty easy if we already have a linear model. It would take a little more work in Excel. pr <- residuals(my.lm)/(1 - lm.influence(my.lm)$hat)
PRESS <- sum(pr^2)
PRESS

## [1] 19.9


The predictive R2 is then (from a helpful comment by Ibanescu on LikedIn) the PRESS divided by the total sum of squares, subtracted from one. The total sum of squares can be calculated directly as the sum of the squared residuals, or obtained by summing over Sum Sq from an anova() on our linear model. I prefer using the anova function, as any statistical subtleties are more likely to be properly accounted for there than in my simple code.

# anova to calculate residual sum of squares
my.anova <- anova(my.lm)
tss <- sum(my.anova$"Sum Sq") # predictive R^2 pred.r.squared <- 1 - PRESS/(tss) pred.r.squared  ## [1] 0.5401  You'll notice that this is smaller than the residual R2, which is itself smaller than the basic R2. This is the point of the exercise. We don't want to fool ourselves into thinking we have a better model than we actually do. One way to think of this is that 29% (83% – 54%) of the model is explained by too many factors and random correlations, which we would have attributed to our model if we were just using Excel's built-in function. When the model is good and has few terms, the differences are small. For example, working through the examples in Mitsa's two posts, we see that for her model 3, R2 = 0.96 and the predictive R2 = 0.94, so calculating the predictive R2 wasn't really worth the extra effort for that model. Unfortunately, we can't know, in advance, which models are “good.” For Mitsa's model 1 we have R2 = 0.95 and predictive R2 = 0.32. Even the adjusted R2 looks pretty good for model 1, at 0.94, but we see from the predictive R2 that our model is not very useful. This is the sort of thing we need to know to make correct decisions. Automating In R, we can easily wrap these in functions that we can source() and call directly, reducing the typing. Just create a linear model with lm() (or an equivalent) and pass that to either function. Note that pred_r_squared() calls PRESS(), so both functions have to be sourced. pred_r_squared <- function(linear.model) { lm.anova <- anova(linear.model) tss <- sum(lm.anova$"Sum Sq")
# predictive R^2
pred.r.squared <- 1 - PRESS(linear.model)/(tss)
return(pred.r.squared)
}

PRESS <- function(linear.model) {
pr <- residuals(linear.model)/(1 - lm.influence(linear.model)\$hat)
PRESS <- sum(pr^2)
return(PRESS)
}


Then we just call the function to get the result:

pred.r.squared <- pred_r_squared(my.lm)
pred.r.squared

## [1] 0.5401


I've posted these as Gists on GitHub, with extra comments, so you can copy and paste from here or go branch or copy them there.

A Simple Introduction to the Graphing Philosophy of ggplot2

“The emphasis in ggplot2 is reducing the amount of thinking time by making it easier to go from the plot in your brain to the plot on the page.” (Wickham, 2012)

“Base graphics are good for drawing pictures; ggplot2 graphics are good for understanding the data.” (Wickham, 2012)

I’m not ggplot2’s creator, Hadley Wickham, but I do find myself in discussions trying to explain how to build graphs in ggplot2. It’s a very elegant system, but also very different from other graphing systems. Once you understand the organizing philosophy, ggplot2 becomes very easy to work with.

The grammar of ggplot2 graphics

There is a basic grammar to all graphics production. In R‘s base graphics or in Excel, you feed ranges of data to a plot as x and y elements, then manipulate colors, scale dimensions and other parts of the graph as graphical elements or options.

ggplot2’s grammar makes a clear distinction between your data and what gets displayed on the screen or page. You feed ggplot2 your data, then apply a series of mappings and transformations to create a visual representation of that data. Even with base graphics or Excel we never really plot the data itself, we only create a representation; ggplot2 makes this distinction explicit. In addition, ggplot2’s structure makes it very easy to tweak a graph to look the way you want by adding mappings.

A ggplot2 graph is built up from a few basic elements:

 1 Data The raw data that you want to plot 2 Geometries geom_ The geometric shapes that will represent the data. 3 Aethetics aes() Aesthetics of the geometric and statistical objects, such as color, size, shape and position. 4 Scales scale_ Maps between the data and the aesthetic dimensions, such as data range to plot width or factor values to colors

Putting it together, the code to build a ggplot2 graph looks something like:

data
+ geometry to represent the data,
+ aesthetic mappings of data to plot coordinates like position, color and size
+ scaling of ranges of the data to ranges of the aesthetics


A real example shows off how this all fits together.

library(ggplot2)
# Create some data for our example
some.data <- data.frame(timer = 1:12,
countdown = 12:1,
category = factor(letters[1:3]))
# Generate the plot
some.plot <- ggplot(data = some.data, aes(x = timer, y = countdown)) +
geom_point(aes(colour = category)) +
scale_x_continuous(limits = c(0, 15)) +
scale_colour_brewer(palette = "Dark2") +
coord_fixed(ratio=1)
# Display the plot
some.plot


Demonstration of the key concepts in the grammar of graphics: data, geometries, aesthetic mappings and scale mappings.

Here you can see that the data is passed to ggplot(), aesthetic mappings between the data and the plot coordinates, a geometry to represent the data and a couple of scales to map between the data range and the plot ranges.

More advanced parts of the ggplot2 grammar

The above will get you a basic graph, but ggplot2 includes a few more parts of the grammar that you’ll want to be aware of as you try to visualize more complex data:

 5 Statistical transformations stat_ Statistical summaries of the data that can be plotted, such as quantiles, fitted curves (loess, linear models, etc.), sums and so o. 6 Coordinate systems coord_ The transformation used for mapping data coordinates into the plane of the data rectangle. 7 Facets facet_ The arrangement of the data into a grid of plots (also known as latticing, trellising or creating small multiples). 8 Visual Themes theme The overall visual defaults of a plot: background, grids, axe, default typeface, sizes, colors, etc.

Hadley Wickham describes various pieces of this grammar in recorded presentations on Vimeo and YouTube and the online documentation to ggplot2. The most complete explanation is in his book ggplot2: Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis (Use R!) (Wickham, 2009).

References

Wickham, Hadley. ggplot2: Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis. Dordrecht, Heibelberg, London, New York: Springer, 2009. Print.
Wickham, Hadley. A Backstage Tour of ggplot2 with Hadley Wickham. 2012. Video. YouTube. Web. 21 Mar 2014. . Contributed by REvolutionAnalytics.