Reversed Y axis in base R



This post explains how to reverse the Y axis on a chart with R. It uses a line chart as example and provides the reproducible code.

Line chart Section About line chart

It is a common need in dataviz to flip the Y axis upside down. In base R this is pretty easy to do: you just have to reverse the values of the ylim argument.

This can be done using this statement: rev(range(y))

Note: be carefull, do not build a counter-iintuitive chart

# Create data
x <- seq(1,29)^2+runif(29,0.98)
y <- abs(seq(1,29)+4*runif(29,0.4))

# Make the plotwith ylim in reverse
plot(y~x , ylim = rev(range(y)) ,
     lwd=4 , type="l" , bty="n" , ylab="value of y (decreasing)" , col=rgb(0.2,0.4,0.6,0.8) )

#Add the grey lines
abline(v=seq(0,900,100) , col="grey" , lwd=0.6)

Related chart types


Line plot
Area
Stacked area
Streamchart



Contact

This document is a work by Yan Holtz. Any feedback is highly encouraged. You can fill an issue on Github, drop me a message on Twitter, or send an email pasting yan.holtz.data with gmail.com.

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