Scales

We’ll focus more on the use of the ggplot2 package and a little dplyr for data manipulation. 3 Three additional packages will be also be used.

library(tidyverse)
library(scales)
library(ggrepel)
library(patchwork)

The third way you can make your plot better for communication is to adjust the scales. Scales control how the aesthetic mappings manifest visually.

Default scales

Normally, ggplot2 automatically adds scales for you. For example, when you type:

ggplot(mpg, aes(x = displ, y = hwy)) +
  geom_point(aes(color = class))

ggplot2 automatically adds default scales behind the scenes:

ggplot(mpg, aes(x = displ, y = hwy)) +
  geom_point(aes(color = class)) +
  scale_x_continuous() +
  scale_y_continuous() +
  scale_color_discrete()

Note the naming scheme for scales: scale_ followed by the name of the aesthetic, then _, then the name of the scale. The default scales are named according to the type of variable they align with: continuous, discrete, datetime, or date. scale_x_continuous() puts the numeric values from displ on a continuous number line on the x-axis, scale_color_discrete() chooses colors for each of the class of car, etc. There are lots of non-default scales which you’ll learn about below.

The default scales have been carefully chosen to do a good job for a wide range of inputs. Nevertheless, you might want to override the defaults for two reasons:

• You might want to tweak some of the parameters of the default scale. This allows you to do things like change the breaks on the axes, or the key labels on the legend.

• You might want to replace the scale altogether, and use a completely different algorithm. Often you can do better than the default because you know more about the data.

Axis ticks and legend keys

Collectively axes and legends are called guides. Axes are used for x and y aesthetics; legends are used for everything else.

There are two primary arguments that affect the appearance of the ticks on the axes and the keys on the legend: breaks and labels. Breaks controls the position of the ticks, or the values associated with the keys. Labels controls the text label associated with each tick/key. The most common use of breaks is to override the default choice:

ggplot(mpg, aes(x = displ, y = hwy, color = drv)) +
  geom_point() +
  scale_y_continuous(breaks = seq(15, 40, by = 5)) 

You can use labels in the same way (a character vector the same length as breaks), but you can also set it to NULL to suppress the labels altogether. This can be useful for maps, or for publishing plots where you can’t share the absolute numbers. You can also use breaks and labels to control the appearance of legends. For discrete scales for categorical variables, labels can be a named list of the existing levels names and the desired labels for them.

ggplot(mpg, aes(x = displ, y = hwy, color = drv)) +
  geom_point() +
  scale_x_continuous(labels = NULL) +
  scale_y_continuous(labels = NULL) +
  scale_color_discrete(labels = c("4" = "4-wheel", "f" = "front", "r" = "rear"))

The labels argument coupled with labelling functions from the scales package is also useful for formatting numbers as currency, percent, etc. The plot on the left shows default labelling with label_dollar(), which adds a dollar sign as well as a thousand separator comma. The plot on the right adds further customization by dividing dollar values by 1,000 and adding a suffix “K” (for “thousands”) as well as adding custom breaks. Note that breaks is in the original scale of the data.

# Left
ggplot(diamonds, aes(x = price, y = cut)) +
  geom_boxplot(alpha = 0.05) +
  scale_x_continuous(labels = label_dollar())

# Right
ggplot(diamonds, aes(x = price, y = cut)) +
  geom_boxplot(alpha = 0.05) +
  scale_x_continuous(
    labels = label_dollar(scale = 1/1000, suffix = "K"), 
    breaks = seq(1000, 19000, by = 6000)
  )

Another handy label function is label_percent():

ggplot(diamonds, aes(x = cut, fill = clarity)) +
  geom_bar(position = "fill") +
  scale_y_continuous(name = "Percentage", labels = label_percent())

Another use of breaks is when you have relatively few data points and want to highlight exactly where the observations occur. For example, take this plot that shows when each US president started and ended their term.

presidential |>
  mutate(id = 33 + row_number()) |>
  ggplot(aes(x = start, y = id)) +
  geom_point() +
  geom_segment(aes(xend = end, yend = id)) +
  scale_x_date(name = NULL, breaks = presidential$start, date_labels = "'%y")

Note that for the breaks argument we pulled out the start variable as a vector with presidential$start because we can’t do an aesthetic mapping for this argument. Also note that the specification of breaks and labels for date and datetime scales is a little different:

• date_labels takes a format specification, in the same form as parse_datetime().

• date_breaks (not shown here), takes a string like “2 days” or “1 month”.

Legend layout

You will most often use breaks and labels to tweak the axes. While they both also work for legends, there are a few other techniques you are more likely to use.

To control the overall position of the legend, you need to use a theme() setting. We’ll come back to themes at the end of the chapter, but in brief, they control the non-data parts of the plot. The theme setting legend.position controls where the legend is drawn:

base <- ggplot(mpg, aes(x = displ, y = hwy)) +
  geom_point(aes(color = class))

base + theme(legend.position = "right") # the default

base + theme(legend.position = "left")

base + 
  theme(legend.position = "top") +
  guides(color = guide_legend(nrow = 3))

base + 
  theme(legend.position = "bottom") +
  guides(color = guide_legend(nrow = 3))

If your plot is short and wide, place the legend at the legend at the top or bottom, and if it’s tall and narrow, place the legend at the left or right. You can also use legend.position = “none” to suppress the display of the legend altogether.

To control the display of individual legends, use guides() along with guide_legend() or guide_colorbar(). The following example shows two important settings: controlling the number of rows the legend uses with nrow, and overriding one of the aesthetics to make the points bigger. This is particularly useful if you have used a low alpha to display many points on a plot.

ggplot(mpg, aes(x = displ, y = hwy)) +
  geom_point(aes(color = class)) +
  geom_smooth(se = FALSE) +
  theme(legend.position = "bottom") +
  guides(color = guide_legend(nrow = 2, override.aes = list(size = 4)))

#> `geom_smooth()` using method = 'loess' and formula = 'y ~ x'

Note that the name of the argument in guides() matches the name of the aesthetic, just like in labs().

Replacing a scale

Instead of just tweaking the details a little, you can instead replace the scale altogether. There are two types of scales you’re mostly likely to want to switch out: continuous position scales and color scales. Fortunately, the same principles apply to all the other aesthetics, so once you’ve mastered position and color, you’ll be able to quickly pick up other scale replacements.

It’s very useful to plot transformations of your variable. For example, it’s easier to see the precise relationship between carat and price if we log transform them:

ggplot(diamonds, aes(x = carat, y = price)) +
  geom_bin2d()

ggplot(diamonds, aes(x = log10(carat), y = log10(price))) +
  geom_bin2d()

However, the disadvantage of this transformation is that the axes are now labelled with the transformed values, making it hard to interpret the plot. Instead of doing the transformation in the aesthetic mapping, we can instead do it with the scale. This is visually identical, except the axes are labelled on the original data scale.

ggplot(diamonds, aes(x = carat, y = price)) +
  geom_bin2d() + 
  scale_x_log10() + 
  scale_y_log10()

Another scale that is frequently customized is color. The default categorical scale picks colors that are evenly spaced around the color wheel. Useful alternatives are the ColorBrewer scales which have been hand tuned to work better for people with common types of color blindness. The two plots below look similar, but there is enough difference in the shades of red and green that the dots on the right can be distinguished even by people with red-green color blindness.1

ggplot(mpg, aes(x = displ, y = hwy)) +
  geom_point(aes(color = drv))

ggplot(mpg, aes(x = displ, y = hwy)) +
  geom_point(aes(color = drv)) +
  scale_color_brewer(palette = "Set1")

Don’t forget simpler techniques for improving accessibility. If there are just a few colors, you can add a redundant shape mapping. This will also help ensure your plot is interpretable in black and white.

ggplot(mpg, aes(x = displ, y = hwy)) +
  geom_point(aes(color = drv, shape = drv)) +
  scale_color_brewer(palette = "Set1")

The ColorBrewer scales are documented online at https://colorbrewer2.org/ and made available in R via the RColorBrewer package, by Erich Neuwirth. Figure 12.1 shows the complete list of all palettes. The sequential (top) and diverging (bottom) palettes are particularly useful if your categorical values are ordered, or have a “middle”. This often arises if you’ve used cut() to make a continuous variable into a categorical variable.

When you have a predefined mapping between values and colors, use scale_color_manual(). For example, if we map presidential party to color, we want to use the standard mapping of red for Republicans and blue for Democrats. One approach for assigning these colors is using hex color codes:

presidential |>
  mutate(id = 33 + row_number()) |>
  ggplot(aes(x = start, y = id, color = party)) +
  geom_point() +
  geom_segment(aes(xend = end, yend = id)) +
  scale_color_manual(values = c(Republican = "#E81B23", Democratic = "#00AEF3"))

For continuous color, you can use the built-in scale_color_gradient() or scale_fill_gradient(). If you have a diverging scale, you can use scale_color_gradient2(). That allows you to give, for example, positive and negative values different colors. That’s sometimes also useful if you want to distinguish points above or below the mean.

Another option is to use the viridis color scales. The designers, Nathaniel Smith and Stéfan van der Walt, carefully tailored continuous color schemes that are perceptible to people with various forms of color blindness as well as perceptually uniform in both color and black and white. These scales are available as continuous (c), discrete (d), and binned (b) palettes in ggplot2.

df <- tibble(
  x = rnorm(10000),
  y = rnorm(10000)
)

ggplot(df, aes(x, y)) +
  geom_hex() +
  coord_fixed() +
  labs(title = "Default, continuous", x = NULL, y = NULL)

ggplot(df, aes(x, y)) +
  geom_hex() +
  coord_fixed() +
  scale_fill_viridis_c() +
  labs(title = "Viridis, continuous", x = NULL, y = NULL)

ggplot(df, aes(x, y)) +
  geom_hex() +
  coord_fixed() +
  scale_fill_viridis_b() +
  labs(title = "Viridis, binned", x = NULL, y = NULL)

Note that all color scales come in two varieties: scale_color_() and scale_fill_() for the color and fill aesthetics respectively (the color scales are available in both UK and US spellings)

Zooming

There are three ways to control the plot limits:

1. Adjusting what data are plotted.
2. Setting the limits in each scale.
3. Setting xlim and ylim in coord_cartesian().

We’ll demonstrate these options in a series of plots. The plot on the left shows the relationship between engine size and fuel efficiency, colored by type of drive train. The plot on the right shows the same variables, but subsets the data that are plotted. Subsetting the data has affected the x and y scales as well as the smooth curve.

ggplot(mpg, aes(x = displ, y = hwy)) +
  geom_point(aes(color = drv)) +
  geom_smooth()

mpg |>
  filter(displ >= 5 & displ <= 6 & hwy >= 10 & hwy <= 25) |>
  ggplot(aes(x = displ, y = hwy)) +
  geom_point(aes(color = drv)) +
  geom_smooth()

Let’s compare these to the two plots below where the plot on the left sets the limits on individual scales and the plot on the right sets them in coord_cartesian(). We can see that reducing the limits is equivalent to subsetting the data. Therefore, to zoom in on a region of the plot, it’s generally best to use coord_cartesian().

ggplot(mpg, aes(x = displ, y = hwy)) +
  geom_point(aes(color = drv)) +
  geom_smooth() +
  scale_x_continuous(limits = c(5, 6)) +
  scale_y_continuous(limits = c(10, 25))

ggplot(mpg, aes(x = displ, y = hwy)) +
  geom_point(aes(color = drv)) +
  geom_smooth() +
  coord_cartesian(xlim = c(5, 6), ylim = c(10, 25))

On the other hand, setting the limits on individual scales is generally more useful if you want to expand the limits, e.g., to match scales across different plots. For example, if we extract two classes of cars and plot them separately, it’s difficult to compare the plots because all three scales (the x-axis, the y-axis, and the color aesthetic) have different ranges.

suv <- mpg |> filter(class == "suv")
compact <- mpg |> filter(class == "compact")

# Left
ggplot(suv, aes(x = displ, y = hwy, color = drv)) +
  geom_point()

# Right
ggplot(compact, aes(x = displ, y = hwy, color = drv)) +
  geom_point()

One way to overcome this problem is to share scales across multiple plots, training the scales with the limits of the full data.

x_scale <- scale_x_continuous(limits = range(mpg$displ))
y_scale <- scale_y_continuous(limits = range(mpg$hwy))
col_scale <- scale_color_discrete(limits = unique(mpg$drv))

# Left
ggplot(suv, aes(x = displ, y = hwy, color = drv)) +
  geom_point() +
  x_scale +
  y_scale +
  col_scale

# Right
ggplot(compact, aes(x = displ, y = hwy, color = drv)) +
  geom_point() +
  x_scale +
  y_scale +
  col_scale

In this particular case, you could have simply used faceting, but this technique is useful more generally, if for instance, you want to spread plots over multiple pages of a report.