CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rggplot2
amwalker
amwalker

Reputation: 355

How to change distance between breaks for continuous x-axis on ggplot?

I have a dataset with y-axis = diversity indices and x-axis = depth. I am looking at how diversity changes with depth (increases/decreases). It is informative to visualize these changes over depth (so transforming isn't helpful), however it is difficult with the disparity between number of samples for different depths (more samples at shallower versus deeper depths. With the following code: 

breaks_depth=c(0,50,100,150,250,350,450,500,1200)

ggplot(data=df, aes(x=Depth, y=Diversity)) +
geom_line()+
scale_y_continuous(breaks=seq(0,1400,200), limits=c(0,1400))+
scale_x_continuous(breaks=breaks_depth, limits=c(0,1200))

I get the following plot:

enter image description here

I would like to get a plot such that the distance between 500m and 1200m depth is smaller and the distance between the shallower depths (0-150m) is greater. Is this possible? I have tried expand and different break and limit variations. The dput() of this dataset can be found here. The rownames are the sample IDs and the columns I am using for the plot are: y-axis=invsimpson_rd, and x-axis=Depth_rd. TIA.

****EDIT***** Winner code and plot modified from Calum's answer below. 

ggplot(data=a_div, aes(x=Depth_rd, y=invsimpson_rd)) +
geom_line()+
scale_y_continuous(breaks=seq(0,1400,200), limits=c(0,1400))+
scale_x_continuous(trans="log10",breaks = c(0, 
15,25,50,100,150,200,250,300,350,400,450, seq(600, 1200, by = 200)))

enter image description here

Upvotes: 1

Views: 5844

Answers (1)

Calum You
Calum You

Reputation: 15062

Here's an example with the built in economics dataset. You can see that you can specify the breaks however you want as per usual, but the "sqrt" transformation shifts the actual plotted values to have more space near the beginning of the series. You can use other built in transformations or define your own as well.

EDIT: updated with example data and some comparison of common different trans options. 

library(tidyverse)
tbl <- structure(list(yval = c(742, 494, 919, 625, 124, 788, 583, 213, 715, 363, 15, 313, 472, 559, 314, 494, 388, 735, 242, 153, 884, 504, 267, 454, 325, 305, 746, 628, 549, 345, 327, 230, 271, 486, 971, 979, 857, 779, 394, 903, 585, 238, 702, 850, 611, 710, 694, 674, 1133, 468, 784, 634, 234, 61, 325, 505, 693, 1019, 766, 435, 407, 772, 925, 877, 187, 290, 782, 674, 1263, 1156, 935, 499, 791, 797, 537, 308, 761, 744, 674, 764, 560, 805, 540, 427, 711), xval = c(80, 350, 750, 100, 20, 200, 350, 50, 110, 20, 200, 350, 60, 100, 20, 40, 60, 100, 20, 40, 350, 50, 20, 40, 50, 30, 40, 260, 1000, 200, 200, 200, 500, 50, 350, 360, 380, 250, 60, 190, 40, 70, 70, 40, 40, 70, 180, 180, 440, 370, 130, 1200, 20, 20, 30, 80, 120, 200, 220, 120, 40, 80, 350, 750, 20, 80, 200, 320, 500, 220, 160, 80, 140, 350, 100, 40, 350, 100, 200, 340, 60, 40, 100, 60, 40)), .Names = c("yval", "xval"), row.names = c(NA, -85L), class = c("tbl_df", "tbl", "data.frame"))

ggplot(tbl) +
  geom_line(aes(x = xval, y = yval)) +
  scale_x_continuous(trans = "sqrt", breaks = c(0,50,100,150,250,350,450,500,1200))


ggplot(tbl) +
  geom_line(aes(x = xval, y = yval)) +
  scale_x_continuous(trans = "log10", breaks = c(0,50,100,150,250,350,450,500,1200))

Created on 2018-04-27 by the reprex package (v0.2.0).

Upvotes: 2

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