CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rggplot2
Jonathan Shore
Jonathan Shore

Reputation: 920

How to order breaks with ggplot / geom_bar

I have a data.frame with entries like:

   variable  importance order
1       foo  0.06977263     1
2       bar  0.05532474     2
3       baz  0.03589902     3
4     alpha  0.03552195     4
5      beta  0.03489081     5
       ...

When plotting the above, with the breaks = variable, I would like for the order to be preserved, rather than placed in alphabetical order.

I am rendering with: 

 
ggplot (data, aes(x=variable, weight=importance, fill=variable)) + 
    geom_bar() + 
    coord_flip() + opts(legend.position='none')

However, the ordering of the variable names is alphabetical, and not the order within the data frame. I had seen a post about using "order" in aes, but appears to have no effect.

I am looking to have a breaks ordering in-line with the "order" column.

There seems to be a similar question How to change the order of discrete x scale in ggplot, but frankly, did not understand the answer in this context.

Upvotes: 3

Views: 4450

Answers (4)

Xavier Guardiola
Xavier Guardiola

Reputation: 2799

Even shorter and easier to understand:

data$Variable <- reorder(data$Variable, data$order)

Upvotes: 4

Shane
Shane

Reputation: 100164

Another solution is to plot the order and then change the labels after the fact:

df <- data.frame(variable=letters[c(3,3,2,5,1)], importance=rnorm(5), order=1:5)
p <- qplot(x=order, weight=importance, fill=variable, data=df, geom="bar") + 
  scale_x_continuous("", breaks=1:5, labels=df$variable) + 
  coord_flip() + opts(legend.position='none')

Upvotes: 2

Joshua Ulrich
Joshua Ulrich

Reputation: 176648

A shot in the dark, but maybe something like this:

data$variable <- factor(data$variable, levels=data$variable)

Upvotes: 1

Brandon Bertelsen
Brandon Bertelsen

Reputation: 44638

Try:

data$variable <- factor(data$variable, levels=levels(data$variable)[order(-data$order)])

From: ggplot2 sorting a plot Part II

Upvotes: 7

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