I'd like to do a vertical histogram. Ideally I should be able to put multiple on a single plot per day.
If this could be combined with quantmod experimental chart_Series or some other library capable of drawing bars for a time series that would be great. Please see the attached screenshot. Ideally I could plot something like this.
Is there anything built in or existing libraries that can help with this?
Violin plots might be close enough to what you want. They are density plots that have been mirrored through one axis, like a hybrid of a boxplot and a density plot. (Much easier to understanding by example than description. :-) )
Here is a simple (somewhat ugly) example of the ggplot2 implementation of them:
library(ggplot2)
library(lubridate)
data(economics) #sample dataset
# calculate year to group by using lubridate's year function
economics$year<-year(economics$date)
# get a subset
subset<-economics[economics$year>2003&economics$year<2007,]
ggplot(subset,aes(x=date,y=unemploy))+
geom_line()+geom_violin(aes(group=year),alpha=0.5)
A prettier example would be:
ggplot(subset,aes(x=date,y=unemploy))+
geom_violin(aes(group=year,colour=year,fill=year),alpha=0.5,
kernel="rectangular")+ # passes to stat_density, makes violin rectangular
geom_line(size=1.5)+ # make the line (wider than normal)
xlab("Year")+ # label one axis
ylab("Unemployment")+ # label the other
theme_bw()+ # make white background on plot
theme(legend.position = "none") # suppress legend
To include ranges instead of or in addition to the line, you would use geom_linerange or geom_pointrange.