CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rboxplot
user53020
user53020

Reputation: 889

R stack multiple boxplot on top of each other

I am trying to make some boxplots. Here is a sample data

set.seed(1)

a<-rnorm(100)
a1<-rnorm(100);a2<-rnorm(100);a3<-rnorm(100);a4<-rnorm(100)
b1<-rnorm(100);b2<-rnorm(100);b3<-rnorm(100);b4<-rnorm(100)
c1<-rnorm(100);c2<-rnorm(100);c3<-rnorm(100);c4<-rnorm(100)
d1<-rnorm(100);d2<-rnorm(100);d3<-rnorm(100);d4<-rnorm(100)
e1<-rnorm(100);e2<-rnorm(100);e3<-rnorm(100);e4<-rnorm(100)
f1<-rnorm(100);f2<-rnorm(100);f3<-rnorm(100);f4<-rnorm(100)  

dat<-data.frame(a,a1,a2,a3,a4,b1,b2,b3,b4,c1,c2,c3,c4,d1,d2,d3,d4,e1,e2,e3,e4,f1,f2,f3,f4)

par(mfrow=c(4,1))
boxplot(dat$a,dat$a1,dat$b1,dat$c1,dat$d1,dat$e1,dat$f1)

boxplot(dat$a,dat$a2,dat$b2,dat$c2,dat$d2,dat$e2,dat$f2)

boxplot(dat$a,dat$a3,dat$b3,dat$c3,dat$d3,dat$e3,dat$f3)

boxplot(dat$a,dat$a4,dat$b4,dat$c4,dat$d4,dat$e4,dat$f4)

And this is the resultant plot

enter image description here

As you can see, the four boxplots lie on top of each other. Is there any way I can combine these plots on top of each other so that there is no spaces between them as well as make the size of boxplot small (i.e. the boxes inside the plots)

I thought doing a par(mfrow=c(4,1)) should do the trick but it is leaving a lot of spaces between the plots. Ideally, I would want a single x-axis and single y-axis (further split into four axis to show the values of each of the plots)

Thanks

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1823

Answers (1)

SlowLoris
SlowLoris

Reputation: 1005

You can use par(mar=c(0,0,0,0)) to get rid of the entire figure margin. Adjusting the four mar values will change the margins (see ?par).

As for changing the size of the boxplots, you can adjust the boxwex argument in the boxplot function (see ?boxplot). Here is code that changes both mar and boxwex.

par(mfrow=c(4,1), mar=c(2,3,0,1))
boxplot(dat$a,dat$a1,dat$b1,dat$c1,dat$d1,dat$e1,dat$f1, boxwex=0.25)
boxplot(dat$a,dat$a2,dat$b2,dat$c2,dat$d2,dat$e2,dat$f2, boxwex=0.5)
boxplot(dat$a,dat$a3,dat$b3,dat$c3,dat$d3,dat$e3,dat$f3, boxwex=0.75)
boxplot(dat$a,dat$a4,dat$b4,dat$c4,dat$d4,dat$e4,dat$f4, boxwex=1, 
        names=1:7)

You can set the first element of mar to 0 if you want to completely get rid of the space between the plots, but that doesn't seem like it would look particularly nice, and that makes it trickier to get the x-axis in the bottom figure without changing its size relative to the first three plots.

Another alternative you could try is to put all the boxplots into one plot, but have side-by-side boxplots for each category (1-7). You can use the at argument in the boxplot function to specify the position of each boxplot along the x-axis.

Upvotes: 1

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