Area chart with base R



This post describes how to build an area chart using base R and the polygon() function. See the area chart section for a ggplot2 implementation.

Area chart Section About area chart

Basic area chart with plot() and polygon()


Base R also allows to build area charts thanks to the polygon() function. This function requires 2 inputs: x and y.

Note that extreme values of both are added at the beginning and at the end of each vectors to make sure the polygon is closed.

# Create data
data <- data.frame(x=seq(1,10), y=sample(seq(1,15),10))

# Draw line on top
plot(data, col=rgb(0.2,0.1,0.5,0.9), type="o", lwd=3, xlab="", ylab="size",
     pch=20)

# Fill the area
polygon(c(min(data$x), data$x, max(data$x)),
        c(min(data$y), data$y, min(data$y)),
        col=rgb(0.2,0.1,0.5,0.2), border=FALSE)

Related chart types


Line plot
Area
Stacked area
Streamchart
Time Series



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