CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rggplot2
user2716568
user2716568

Reputation: 1946

How to reduce geom_text overlap

My dataset contains > 500 observations of match activities performed by individual athletes at different locations and recorded over the duration of a soccer match. An example of my dataset is below, where each symbol refers to a match activity. For example, KE is Kick Effective, recorded at 1 minute in the Defense. 

# Example data
df <- data.frame(Symbol = c('KE', 'TE', 'TE', 'TI',
                              'KE', 'KE', 'H', 'H',
                              'GS', 'KE', 'TE', 'H',
                              'KE', 'H', 'H', 'GS'),
                Location = c('Defense', 'Defense', 'Midfield', 'Forward',
                             'Forward', 'Midfield', 'Midfield', 'Defense',
                             'Defense', 'Defense', 'Forward', 'Midfield',
                             'Midfield', 'Defense', 'Defense', 'Midfield'),
                 Time = c(1, 2, 3, 6,
                            15, 16, 16, 20,
                            22, 23, 26, 26,
                            27, 28, 28, 30))

I wish to visualise this data, by plotting the match activities over time at each location in ggplot2.

# Load required package
require(ggplot2)
# Order factors for plotting
df$Location <- factor(df$Location, levels = c("Defense", "Midfield", "Forward"))

    # Plot
    ggplot(df, x = Time, y = Location) +
      geom_text(data=df, 
                aes(x = Time, y = Location, 
                    label = Symbol), size = 4) +
      theme_classic()

However, some of the geom_text labels overlap one another. I have tried jitter but then I lose meaning of where the activity occurs on the soccer pitch. Unfortunately, check_overlap=TRUE removes any overlapped symbols. I wish to keep the symbols in the same text direction.

Although the symbols are plotted at the time they occur, I am happy to adjust the time slightly (aware they will no longer perfectly align on the plot) to ensure the geom_text symbols are visible. I can do this manually by shifting the Time of each overlapped occurrence forward or back, but with such a big dataset this would take a very long time.

A suggestion was to use ggrepel and I did this below, although it alters the geom_text in the y-axis which is not what I am after.

library(ggrepel)
ggplot(df, x = Time, y = Location) +
  geom_text_repel(aes(Time, Location, label = Symbol))

Is there a way I can check for overlap and automatically adjust the symbols, to ensure they are visible and still retain meaning on the y-axis? Perhaps one solution could be to find each Location and if a Symbol is within two minutes of another in the same Location, Time is adjusted.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Upvotes: 3

Views: 8807

Answers (1)

zx8754
zx8754

Reputation: 56149

We could add points, then use ggrepel with minimum line length to points from text labels.

library(ggrepel) # ggrepel_0.6.5 ggplot2_2.2.1

ggplot(df, aes(x = Time, y = Location, label = Symbol)) +
  geom_point() +
  geom_text_repel(size = 4, min.segment.length = unit(0.1, "lines")) +
  theme_classic()

enter image description here Or we could try and use development version with "direction" argument.

ggplot(df, aes(x = Time, y = Location, label = Symbol)) +
  geom_text_repel(size = 4, direction = "x") +
  theme_classic()

Upvotes: 5

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