Layout

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)

So far we talked about how to create and modify a single plot. What if you have multiple plots you want to lay out in a certain way? The patchwork package allows you to combine separate plots into the same graphic. We loaded this package earlier in the chapter.

To place two plots next to each other, you can simply add them to each other. Note that you first need to create the plots and save them as objects (in the following example they’re called p1 and p2). Then, you place them next to each other with +.

p1 <- ggplot(mpg, aes(x = displ, y = hwy)) + 
  geom_point() + 
  labs(title = "Plot 1")
p2 <- ggplot(mpg, aes(x = drv, y = hwy)) + 
  geom_boxplot() + 
  labs(title = "Plot 2")
p1 + p2

It’s important to note that in the above code chunk we did not use a new function from the patchwork package. Instead, the package added a new functionality to the + operator.

You can also create complex plot layouts with patchwork. In the following, | places the p1 and p3 next to each other and / moves p2 to the next line.

p3 <- ggplot(mpg, aes(x = cty, y = hwy)) + 
  geom_point() + 
  labs(title = "Plot 3")
(p1 | p3) / p2

Additionally, patchwork allows you to collect legends from multiple plots into one common legend, customize the placement of the legend as well as dimensions of the plots, and add a common title, subtitle, caption, etc. to your plots. Below we create 5 plots. We have turned off the legends on the box plots and the scatterplot and collected the legends for the density plots at the top of the plot with & theme(legend.position = “top”). Note the use of the & operator here instead of the usual +. This is because we’re modifying the theme for the patchwork plot as opposed to the individual ggplots. The legend is placed on top, inside the guide_area(). Finally, we have also customized the heights of the various components of our patchwork – the guide has a height of 1, the box plots 3, density plots 2, and the faceted scatter plot 4. Patchwork divides up the area you have allotted for your plot using this scale and places the components accordingly.

p1 <- ggplot(mpg, aes(x = drv, y = cty, color = drv)) + 
  geom_boxplot(show.legend = FALSE) + 
  labs(title = "Plot 1")

p2 <- ggplot(mpg, aes(x = drv, y = hwy, color = drv)) + 
  geom_boxplot(show.legend = FALSE) + 
  labs(title = "Plot 2")

p3 <- ggplot(mpg, aes(x = cty, color = drv, fill = drv)) + 
  geom_density(alpha = 0.5) + 
  labs(title = "Plot 3")

p4 <- ggplot(mpg, aes(x = hwy, color = drv, fill = drv)) + 
  geom_density(alpha = 0.5) + 
  labs(title = "Plot 4")

p5 <- ggplot(mpg, aes(x = cty, y = hwy, color = drv)) + 
  geom_point(show.legend = FALSE) + 
  facet_wrap(~drv) +
  labs(title = "Plot 5")

(guide_area() / (p1 + p2) / (p3 + p4) / p5) +
  plot_annotation(
    title = "City and highway mileage for cars with different drive trains",
    caption = "Source: https://fueleconomy.gov."
  ) +
  plot_layout(
    guides = "collect",
    heights = c(1, 3, 2, 4)
    ) &
  theme(legend.position = "top")

If you’d like to learn more about combining and layout out multiple plots with patchwork, we recommend looking through the guides on the package website: https://patchwork.data-imaginist.com.