R – Overlaying histograms with ggplot2 in R

ggplot2r

I am new to R and am trying to plot 3 histograms onto the same graph.
Everything worked fine, but my problem is that you don't see where 2 histograms overlap – they look rather cut off.

When I make density plots, it looks perfect: each curve is surrounded by a black frame line, and colours look different where curves overlap.

Can someone tell me if something similar can be achieved with the histograms in the 1st picture? This is the code I'm using:

lowf0 <-read.csv (....)
mediumf0 <-read.csv (....)
highf0 <-read.csv(....)
lowf0$utt<-'low f0'
mediumf0$utt<-'medium f0'
highf0$utt<-'high f0'
histogram<-rbind(lowf0,mediumf0,highf0)
ggplot(histogram, aes(f0, fill = utt)) + geom_histogram(alpha = 0.2)

Best Answer

Using @joran's sample data,

ggplot(dat, aes(x=xx, fill=yy)) + geom_histogram(alpha=0.2, position="identity")

note that the default position of geom_histogram is "stack."

see "position adjustment" of this page:

geom_histogram documentation

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.

Rotating and spacing axis labels in ggplot2

Change the last line to

q + theme(axis.text.x = element_text(angle = 90, vjust = 0.5, hjust=1))

By default, the axes are aligned at the center of the text, even when rotated. When you rotate +/- 90 degrees, you usually want it to be aligned at the edge instead:

alt text

The image above is from this blog post.

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

Rotating and spacing axis labels in ggplot2

Related Topic