CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rggplot2
Simon
Simon

Reputation: 552

Change the overlaying order of lines in ggplot

Suppose I have this plot:

library(ggplot2)
pl_data <- data.frame(x = rep(c(1, 2), times = 3), y = c(0, 1, 1, 0, .7, .7), col = rep(c("r", "b", "g"), each = 2))
ggplot(pl_data, aes(x = x, y = y, color = col)) +
  geom_line(size = 3)

Output picture

How can I change the plotting order, so that the red line is plotted above the other two?

The background therefore is that I have plots with very similar lines, and want to see specific lines in the foreground.

I suppose something along the lines of this answer order of stacked bars in ggplot would work. It makes the color column to factors and changes their order, but I would prefer to change this directly in a line of the ggplot call.

I also tried changing the legend order with scale_color_discrete(breaks=c("r", "g", "b"))), but that does not effect the plotting order either.

Upvotes: 21

Views: 12285

Answers (2)

thothal
thothal

Reputation: 20409

So actually the last level of col is on the top. So you need to change the order of the factor and reverse the colors as red is automatically mapped to the first level (used standard colors to illustrate the problem):

pl_data$col <- factor(pl_data$col, c("r", "g", "b"))
ggplot(pl_data, aes(x = x, y = y, color = col)) +
    geom_line(size = 3) + 
    scale_color_manual(values = c(r = "blue", g = "green", b = "red"))

## with standard colors of ggplot2, function taken from:
## http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8197559/emulate-ggplot2-default-color-palette

ggplotColours <- function(n = 6, h = c(0, 360) + 15) {
  if ((diff(h) %% 360) < 1) h[2] <- h[2] - 360/n
  hcl(h = (seq(h[1], h[2], length = n)), c = 100, l = 65)
}
pal <- setNames(ggplotColours(3), c("b", "g", "r"))
ggplot(pl_data, aes(x = x, y = y, color = col)) +
    geom_line(size = 3) + 
    scale_color_manual(values = pal, breaks = c("b", "g", "r"))

enter image description here

Upvotes: 13

Dutchmv
Dutchmv

Reputation: 126

library(ggplot2)
df <- data.frame(
  x = rep(c(1, 2), times = 3), 
  y = c(0, 1, 1, 0, .7, .7), 
  col = rep(c("r", "b", "g"), each = 2))

ggplot() + 
  geom_line(data = df[3:4,], aes(x = x, y = y), color = 'blue', size = 3) +
  geom_line(data = df[5:6,], aes(x = x, y = y), color = 'green', size = 3) +
  geom_line(data = df[1:2,], aes(x = x, y = y), color = 'red', size = 3)

Upvotes: 3

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