R Programming with qplot in ggplot2

The qplot function produces insightful visualizations even with limited data and arguments. I’ll demonstrate some basic graphs in this introduction post to R programming with qplot in ggplot2.

The ggplot2 library is required to use the qplot() function, t. Use the install.packages and library functions to make sure it is installed:

R Programming installing GGPlot2

I’ll use the ChickWeight data set for this demonstration. This is loaded by running data("ChickWeight").You can find the docs online.

Absolute Basics qplot Chart

A useful visualization is to see the weight distribution for all of the chickens on a given diet. To get that for diet 1, I will:

  1. Build the filter
  2. Call qplot

filter <- ChickWeight$Diet == 1
qplot(data=ChickWeight[filter,], x=Chick,
y=weight, size=I(4), color=I(“blue”))

R qplot for ChickWeight

Generating a Box Plot with qplot

For a great in-depth reference on box plot, see this post.

A box plot can be generated by adding one more argument to the call above.

That is, the geom parameter

qplot(data=ChickWeight[filter,], x=Chick,
y=weight, size=I(2), color=I(“blue”),
geom=”boxplot”)

Check out the following to see the actual numbers for Chick ‘7’:

R summary of data.

Above, I linked to a blog post which contains a very clear definition of box plot, “A boxplot is a standardized way of displaying the distribution of data based on a five number summary (“minimum”, first quartile (Q1), median, third quartile (Q3), and “maximum”)”.

From the summary function run above, you can see the values for Chick ‘7` are:

  • Min: 41.0
  • First Quartile: 67.5
  • Median: 150.0
  • Third Quartile: 226.0
  • Max: 305

This matches the chart.

That concludes this introduction to qplot in the ggplot2 library. Insights and distributions can be visualized with a basic filter and minimal arguments.



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