Objectives

• Understand the grammar of ggplot
• Apply aesthetic changes to a plot
• Visualize a distribution
• Visualize a relationship between variables

Questions

• How can I plot my data?
• What type of plot should I use for my data?

Today we’re going to learn how to plot in R using ggplot2. This is a package designed to streamline the production of complicated and aesthetically pleasing plots. You can also make plots in R without ggplot2, but its easier to learn ggplot2 and almost any plot can be constructed with it.

We first have to login to the VPN and then the Rstudio Server in your browser. We already installed most of the tidyverse packages last lab (go back to lab 3 if you didn’t do that). Today we’re going to install a few more packages used in the tutorial

#This has example data for plotting
install.packages("palmerpenguins")
#This has different themes for designing your plots
install.packages("ggthemes")

Then we want to load all the packages. We’re doing this instead of loading tidyverse (which has issues on our system)

library("dplyr")
library("ggplot2")
library("nycflights13")
library("forcats")
library("stringr")
library("readr")
library("tibble")
library("tidyr")
library("purrr")
library("stringr")
library("palmerpenguins")
library("ggthemes")

Now we’re going to work through Chapter 1 of R for Data Science.

If you finish Chapter 1 early, Chapter 9 extends into more complicated plots.