16 Sep 2014

R: ggplot - Plotting multiple variables on a line chart

In my continued playing around with meetup data I wanted to plot the number of members who join the Neo4j group over time.

I started off with the variable 'byWeek' which shows how many members joined the group each week:

> head(byWeek)
Source: local data frame [6 x 2]

        week n
1 2011-06-02 8
2 2011-06-09 4
3 2011-06-30 2
4 2011-07-14 1
5 2011-07-21 1
6 2011-08-18 1

I wanted to plot the actual count alongside a rolling average for which I created the following data frame:

library(zoo)
joinsByWeek = data.frame(actual = byWeek$n,
                         week = byWeek$week,
                         rolling = rollmean(byWeek$n, 4, fill = NA, align=c("right")))

> head(joinsByWeek, 10)
   actual       week rolling
1       8 2011-06-02      NA
2       4 2011-06-09      NA
3       2 2011-06-30      NA
4       1 2011-07-14    3.75
5       1 2011-07-21    2.00
6       1 2011-08-18    1.25
7       1 2011-10-13    1.00
8       2 2011-11-24    1.25
9       1 2012-01-05    1.25
10      3 2012-01-12    1.75

The next step was to work out how to plot both 'rolling' and 'actual' on the same line chart. The easiest way is to make two calls to 'geom_line', like so:

ggplot(joinsByWeek, aes(x = week)) +
  geom_line(aes(y = rolling), colour="blue") +
  geom_line(aes(y = actual), colour = "grey") +
  ylab(label="Number of new members") +
  xlab("Week")

Alternatively we can make use of the 'melt' function from the http://www.statmethods.net/management/reshape.html library...

library(reshape)
meltedJoinsByWeek = melt(joinsByWeek, id = 'week')

> head(meltedJoinsByWeek, 20)
   week variable value
1     1   actual     8
2     2   actual     4
3     3   actual     2
4     4   actual     1
5     5   actual     1
6     6   actual     1
7     7   actual     1
8     8   actual     2
9     9   actual     1
10   10   actual     3
11   11   actual     1
12   12   actual     2
13   13   actual     4
14   14   actual     2
15   15   actual     3
16   16   actual     5
17   17   actual     1
18   18   actual     2
19   19   actual     1
20   20   actual     2

...which then means we can plot the chart with a single call to geom_line:

ggplot(meltedJoinsByWeek, aes(x = week, y = value, colour = variable)) +
  geom_line() +
  ylab(label="Number of new members") +
  xlab("Week Number") +
  scale_colour_manual(values=c("grey", "blue"))

About the author

I'm currently working on short form content at ClickHouse. I publish short 5 minute videos showing how to solve data problems on YouTube @LearnDataWithMark. I previously worked on graph analytics at Neo4j, where I also co-authored the O'Reilly Graph Algorithms Book with Amy Hodler.