See how Month has changed to have character instead of numbers
summary(airquality$Month)
Length Class Mode
153 character character
Month is a categorical variable with different levels, called factors.
This is one way to reorder the Months so they do not default to alphabetical (you will see another way to reorder DIRECTLY in the chunk that creates the plot below in Plot 1)
Here is a first attempt at viewing a histogram of temperature by the months May through September. We will see that temperatures increase over these months. The median temperature appears to be about 75 degrees.
Reorder the legend so that it is not the default (alphabetical), but rather in chronological order.
fill = Month colors the histogram by months between May - Sept.
scale_fill_discrete(name = “Month”…) provides the month names on the right side as a legend.
p1 <- airquality |>ggplot(aes(x=Temp, fill=Month)) +geom_histogram(position="identity")+scale_fill_discrete(name ="Month", labels =c("May", "June","July", "August", "September")) +labs(x ="Monthly Temperatures from May - Sept", y ="Frequency of Temps",title ="Histogram of Monthly Temperatures from May - Sept, 1973",caption ="New York State Department of Conservation and the National Weather Service") #provide the data sourcep1
`stat_bin()` using `bins = 30`. Pick better value with `binwidth`.
Is this plot useful in answering questions about monthly temperature values?
Plot 2: Improve the histogram using ggplot
Outline the bars in white using the color = “white” command
Use alpha to add some transparency (values between 0 and 1)
Change the binwidth
Histogram of Average Temperature by Month
Add some transparency and white borders around the histogram bars. Here July stands out for having high frequency of 85 degree temperatures. The dark purple color indicates overlaps of months due to the transparency.
p2 <- airquality |>ggplot(aes(x=Temp, fill=Month)) +geom_histogram(position="identity", alpha=0.5, binwidth =5, color ="white")+scale_fill_discrete(name ="Month", labels =c("May", "June","July", "August", "September")) +labs(x ="Monthly Temperatures from May - Sept", y ="Frequency of Temps",title ="Histogram of Monthly Temperatures from May - Sept, 1973",caption ="New York State Department of Conservation and the National Weather Service")p2
Did this improve the readability of the p
Plot 3: Create side-by-side boxplots categorized by Month
We can see that August has the highest temperatures based on the boxplot distribution.
p3 <- airquality |>ggplot(aes(Month, Temp, fill = Month)) +labs(x ="Months from May through September", y ="Temperatures", title ="Side-by-Side Boxplot of Monthly Temperatures",caption ="New York State Department of Conservation and the National Weather Service") +geom_boxplot() +scale_fill_discrete(name ="Month", labels =c("May", "June","July", "August", "September"))p3
Notice that the points above and below the boxplots in June and July are outliers
Plot 4: Make the same side-by-side boxplots, but in grey-scale
Use the scale_fill_grey command for the grey-scale legend, and again, use fill=Month in the aesthetics
Side by Side Boxplots in Gray Scale
Here we just changed the color palette to gray scale using scale_fill_grey
p4 <- airquality |>ggplot(aes(Month, Temp, fill = Month)) +labs(x ="Monthly Temperatures", y ="Temperatures", title ="Side-by-Side Boxplot of Monthly Temperatures",caption ="New York State Department of Conservation and the National Weather Service") +geom_boxplot()+scale_fill_grey(name ="Month", labels =c("May", "June","July", "August", "September"))p4
Plot 5: Now make one new plot on your own, that is meaningfully different from the 4 I have shown you. You can select any of the variables in this dataset. Be sure to explore the dataset to see which variables are included that we have not explored yet. You may create a scatterplot, histogram, boxplot, or something else.
p5 <- airquality |>ggplot(aes(x=Wind, y=Month)) +geom_dotplot(binwidth = .33) +labs(x="Recorded Wind Speeds", y ="Months (May-September)",title ="Dotplot of Wind Speeds Separated by Month from May - Sept, 1973",caption ="New York State Department of Conservation and the National Weather Service")p5
I have created a dot plot which displays recorded wind speeds over a 5 month period of time. It plots each data point on a graph where each data point is a dot and data points with the same value get stacked on each other. I needed to change the type of plot to make this modification, changing geom_boxplot() into geom_dotplot() made the type of graph change. I also needed to adjust the binwidth to fit each data point. The rest of the changes were changes to the labels and title.