Custom ggplot2 scatterplot



This post is dedicated to customization you can apply to a scatterplot built with ggplot2

Scatter Section About Scatter

This post follows the previous basic scatterplot with ggplot2. It shows the kind of customization you can apply to circles thanks to the geom_point() options:

  • color: the stroke color, the circle outline
  • stroke: the stroke width
  • fill: color of the circle inner part
  • shape: shape of the marker. See list in the ggplot2 section
  • alpha: circle transparency, [0->1], 0 is fully transparent
  • color: the stroke color, the circle outline
  • size: circle size

Note: these options will be uniform among markers if you put it in the geom_point() call. You can also map them to a variable if put inside the aes() part of the code.

# library
library(ggplot2)
 
# Iris dataset is natively provided by R
#head(iris)
 
# use options!
ggplot(iris, aes(x=Sepal.Length, y=Sepal.Width)) + 
    geom_point(
        color="orange",
        fill="#69b3a2",
        shape=21,
        alpha=0.5,
        size=6,
        stroke = 2
        )

Using theme_ipsum


Note that applying the theme_ipsum of the hrbrthemes package is always a good option.

# library
library(ggplot2)
library(hrbrthemes)

# Iris dataset is natively provided by R
#head(iris)
 
# use options!
ggplot(iris, aes(x=Sepal.Length, y=Sepal.Width)) + 
    geom_point(
        color="black",
        fill="#69b3a2",
        shape=22,
        alpha=0.5,
        size=6,
        stroke = 1
        ) +
    theme_ipsum()

Related chart types


Scatter
Heatmap
Correlogram
Bubble
Connected scatter
Density 2d



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