R – How to get a barplot with several variables side by side grouped by a factor

bar-chartggplot2r

I have a dataset which looks like this one below. I am trying to make a barplot with the grouping variable gender, with all the variables side by side on the x axis (grouped by gender as filler with different colors), and mean values of variables on the y axis (which basically represents percentages)

tea                coke            beer             water           gender
14.55              26.50793651     22.53968254      40              1
24.92997199        24.50980392     26.05042017      24.50980393     2
23.03732304        30.63063063     25.41827542      20.91377091     1   
225.51781276       24.6064623      24.85501243      50.80645161     1
24.53662842        26.03706973     25.24271845      24.18358341     2

In the end I want to get a barplot like this
enter image description here

any suggestions how to do that? I made some searches but I only find examples for factors on the x axis, not variables grouped by a factor. any help will be appreciated!

Best Answer

You can use aggregate to calculate the means:

means<-aggregate(df,by=list(df$gender),mean)
Group.1      tea     coke     beer    water gender
1       1 87.70171 27.24834 24.27099 37.24007      1
2       2 24.73330 25.27344 25.64657 24.34669      2

Get rid of the Group.1 column

means<-means[,2:length(means)]

Then you have reformat the data to be in long format:

library(reshape2)
means.long<-melt(means,id.vars="gender")
  gender variable    value
1      1      tea 87.70171
2      2      tea 24.73330
3      1     coke 27.24834
4      2     coke 25.27344
5      1     beer 24.27099
6      2     beer 25.64657
7      1    water 37.24007
8      2    water 24.34669

Finally, you can use ggplot2 to create your plot:

library(ggplot2)
ggplot(means.long,aes(x=variable,y=value,fill=factor(gender)))+
  geom_bar(stat="identity",position="dodge")+
  scale_fill_discrete(name="Gender",
                      breaks=c(1, 2),
                      labels=c("Male", "Female"))+
  xlab("Beverage")+ylab("Mean Percentage")

enter image description here

Any ggplots side-by-side (or n plots on a grid)

The function grid.arrange() in the gridExtra package will combine multiple plots; this is how you put two side by side.

require(gridExtra)
plot1 <- qplot(1)
plot2 <- qplot(1)
grid.arrange(plot1, plot2, ncol=2)

This is useful when the two plots are not based on the same data, for example if you want to plot different variables without using reshape().

This will plot the output as a side effect. To print the side effect to a file, specify a device driver (such as pdf, png, etc), e.g.

pdf("foo.pdf")
grid.arrange(plot1, plot2)
dev.off()

or, use arrangeGrob() in combination with ggsave(),

ggsave("foo.pdf", arrangeGrob(plot1, plot2))

This is the equivalent of making two distinct plots using par(mfrow = c(1,2)). This not only saves time arranging data, it is necessary when you want two dissimilar plots.

Appendix: Using Facets

Facets are helpful for making similar plots for different groups. This is pointed out below in many answers below, but I want to highlight this approach with examples equivalent to the above plots.

mydata <- data.frame(myGroup = c('a', 'b'), myX = c(1,1))

qplot(data = mydata, 
    x = myX, 
    facets = ~myGroup)

ggplot(data = mydata) + 
    geom_bar(aes(myX)) + 
    facet_wrap(~myGroup)

Update

the plot_grid function in the cowplot is worth checking out as an alternative to grid.arrange. See the answer by @claus-wilke below and this vignette for an equivalent approach; but the function allows finer controls on plot location and size, based on this vignette.

R – Barplot with 2 variables side by side

You have to reshape your data frame from wide to long and then you don't need to set bars for each condition separately.

Assuming that data frame is named df.

library(reshape2)
df.long<-melt(df)
ggplot(df.long,aes(Block,value,fill=variable))+
     geom_bar(stat="identity",position="dodge")

enter image description here

Best Answer

Related Solutions

R – Side-by-side plots with ggplot2

Any ggplots side-by-side (or n plots on a grid)

Appendix: Using Facets

Update

R – Barplot with 2 variables side by side

Related Topic