[R] Boxplot Fill Pattern

[R. Michael Weylandt]

It looks very nice -- hopefully your reviewers agree.

The built in documentation is a little sparse (though greatly enhanced
in the newest 0.9.0 release) -- but Hadley's website
http://had.co.nz/ggplot2/ is very good and there's a ggplot2 book
available on Amazon (though it's a little out of date -- I believe
Hadley hinted at some point that after one more big release for
ggplot2 he'd think about rewriting the book)

Michael

On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 6:52 PM, Gabriel Yospin <yosping at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks for the help, Michael. ggplot2 is an interesting package. It would
> nice if there were better documentation in the help files, but the (fully
> functional) code (with fake data) I've settled on is below. I am
> particularly pleased with the theme_bw, which will use less ink than the
> default theme, the alignment of the x-grid labels using hjust = 1, and the
> y-axis label, which finally has the superscript it requires!
>
> Per your suggestion, I wrote this code while listening to a variety of
> classic rock ballads - it was extremely helpful.
>
> - Gabe
>
> site.txt = c("Brownsville","Chip Ross","Finley","Jim's
> Creek","Lowell","Mount Pisgah","South Eugene")
> leg.txt = c("Abies grandis","Acer macrophyllum","Calocedrus
> decurrens","Pinus ponderosa","Pseudotsuga meziensii","Quercus
> garryana","Quercus kelloggii")
> #
> # Fake Data
> site = rep(site.txt, each = 21)
> sp = rep(rep(leg.txt, each = 3), times = 7)
> ga = runif(147, 0, 20)
> datnew.lo = data.frame(site,sp,ga)
> #
> # Make the plot
> library(ggplot2)
> theme_set(theme_bw())
> ggplot(datnew.lo, aes(x = sp, y = ga)) + geom_boxplot() +
> facet_wrap(~site, ncol = 7) +
> opts(axis.text.x=theme_text(angle=90, size = 8, hjust = 1)) +
> xlab("Species") +
> ylab(expression(paste('Basal Area Growth Increment (mm  '^{2},')')))
>
> On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 12:22 PM, R. Michael Weylandt
> <michael.weylandt at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 1:08 PM, Gabriel Yospin <yosping at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Hello R Help!
>>
>> Hello Gabe Yospin! (I feel like I should start playing some arena rock
>> anthem now ;-) )
>>
>> >
>> > I would like to make a legible boxplot of tree growth rates for each of
>> > seven tree species at each of seven different sites. It's a lot of data
>> > to
>> > put on one figure, I know. I made a beautiful, interpretable figure
>> > using
>> > color, but my target journal can't deal with color figures. I can use
>> > seven
>> > shades of grey to fill the boxes, but the figure then becomes
>> > uninterpretable - the colors of adjacent boxes are too similar. I cannot
>> > figure out how to add a pattern, hatching, or cross-hatching to the
>> > boxes.
>> >
>> > I see that in 2003 Professor Ripley confirmed that one cannot hatch
>> > boxplots:
>> >
>> > http://tolstoy.newcastle.edu.au/R/help/03a/2622.html
>> >
>> > Is this still true? If so, does anyone have a suggestion for how to make
>> > this figure interpretable in black and white? Should I pick a different
>> > target journal?
>> >
>>
>> I don't think you'd need to change journals just for graphical styles:
>> do it for much less important things, like impact factor. It sounds
>> like the idea of small multiples might help here: I'm not a lattice
>> pro, but here's something you could do in ggplot2 (and I know it's
>> doable in lattice as well):
>>
>> I'm gonna put new lines in all your species names since space will be
>> at a premium:
>>
>> levels(datnew.lo$sp) <- gsub(" ", "\n", levels(datnew.lo$sp))
>>
>> library(ggplot2)
>> ggplot(datnew.lo, aes(x = sp, y = ga)) + geom_boxplot() +
>> facet_wrap(~site, nrow = 2) + opts(axis.text.x=theme_text(angle=45,
>> size = 7))
>>
>> Others with more ggplot / lattice - fu than I can help you tweak this
>> but hopefully this is a start.
>>
>> Michael
>>
>>
>> > Many thanks,
>> >
>> > Gabe
>> >
>> > Functional code to make the color figure with fake data follows:
>> > #
>> > leg.txt = c("Abies grandis","Acer macrophyllum","Calocedrus
>> > decurrens","Pinus ponderosa","Pseudotsuga meziensii","Quercus
>> > garryana","Quercus kelloggii")
>> > site.txt = c("Brownsville","Chip Ross","Finley","Jim's
>> > Creek","Lowell","Mount Pisgah","South Eugene")
>> > colors = c("gray","red","white","blue","yellow","purple","orange")
>> > # Fake data here:
>> > site = rep(site.txt, each = 21)
>> > sp = rep(rep(leg.txt, each = 3), times = 7)
>> > ga = runif(147, 0, 20)
>> > datnew.lo = data.frame(site,sp,ga)
>> > # Now make the plot:
>> > boxplot(ga~sp*site,data=datnew.lo, range = 1,
>> >        col = colors,
>> >        ylim = c(0,30),
>> >        xaxt = "n",
>> >        xlab = "Site",
>> >        ylab = "Basal Area Growth Increment",
>> >        main = "Basal Area Growth Increment by Site and Species")
>> > axis(1, at = c(4,11,18,25,32,39,46),
>> >     labels = site.txt,
>> >     )
>> > abline(v = 7.5, lty = 3)
>> > abline(v = 14.5, lty = 3)
>> > abline(v = 21.5, lty = 3)
>> > abline(v = 28.5, lty = 3)
>> > abline(v = 35.5, lty = 3)
>> > abline(v = 42.5, lty = 3)
>> > legend("topright", legend = leg.txt, fill = colors, bg = "white")
>>
>> Thanks for the great reproducible example! Made this much easier and more
>> fun.
>>
>> >
>> >        [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>> >
>> > ______________________________________________
>> > R-help at r-project.org mailing list
>> > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
>> > PLEASE do read the posting guide
>> > http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>> > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>
>