Graphs-continuous variables

Learning Objectives

By the end of this section you should be able to:

  • Understand how to plot continuous variables
  • Use boxplots, line plots , violin plots and 3D plots for continuous variables

One continuous variable

For the following example we will use a variable describing citizens’ satisfaction with the political system, the name of the variable is v144. We will use the names() function to give a meaningful name to the variable.

The general formula is: names(my_data)[names(my_data) == “old.variable.name”] <- “new_variable_name”

names(EVS_UK)[names(EVS_UK)=="v144"]<- "pol_sat"

table(EVS_UK$pol_sat)
## 
##   1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9  10 
## 170 104 178 223 243 227 305 201  55  46
plot5 <- ggplot(na.omit(EVS_UK), aes(gender,pol_sat))

plot5<-plot5 + geom_boxplot(varwidth=T, fill="mediumpurple4") + 
    labs(title="Box plot", 
         subtitle="Satisfaction with the political system by gender",
         caption="Source: European Value Study (2019)",
         x="Gender",
         y="Satisfied with the political system")

plot5+theme_classic()

See here for all other colours available

Violin Plots

plot6 <- ggplot(na.omit(EVS_UK), aes(education, pol_sat))
plot6<-plot6 + geom_violin(fill="skyblue") + 
  labs(title="Violin plot", 
 subtitle="Satisfaction with the political system by level of education",
         caption="Source: European Value Study (2019)",
         x="Education",
         y="Satisfied with the political system")

plot6+theme_classic()

Continuous variables

Lines

In this section we will use the EconomistData dataset.

plot7 <- ggplot(data = EconomistData, mapping = aes(x = HDI, y = CPI)) +
    geom_line() +
    facet_wrap(facets = vars(Region))+
  labs(title= "Lines",
        subtitle = "Human development index versus consumer price index",
         x = "Human Development Index",
         y = "Consumer Price Index") +
    theme_classic()

plot7

3D Plots: The plotly package

Let’s try to plot some 3D plots. To do so we should install an additional package entitled plotly, install.package("plotly").

library(plotly)
EconomistData <- read.csv("EconomistData.csv")
plot8<- plot_ly(data=EconomistData, x = ~HDI, y = ~CPI, z = ~HDI.Rank, color = ~Region, colors = c('#7B68EE', '#800000')) %>%
  add_markers() %>%
  layout(scene = list(xaxis = list(title = 'HDI'),
                     yaxis = list(title = 'CPI'),
                     zaxis = list(title = 'HDI Rank')))
plot8

Want to learn more about plotly? You may visit https://plot.ly/ggplot2/

Recap

  • The plotly package can be used to create 3D maps of continuous data.
  • Continuous data can be represented using a variety of plot types.
  • geom_boxplot() is used to create box plots
  • geom_violin() is used to create violin plots
  • geom_line() is used to create line plots