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How can a line be overlaid on a bar plot using ggplot2?

Asked 2010-12-02T06:22:41.213
15

I'm looking for a way to plot a bar chart containing two different series, hide the bars for one of the series and instead have a line (smooth if possible) go through the top of where bars for the hidden series would have been (similar to how one might overlay a freq polynomial on a histogram). I've tried the example below but appear to be running into two problems.

First, I need to summarize (total) the data by group, and second, I'd like to convert one of the series (df2) to a line.

df <- data.frame(grp=c("A","A","B","B","C","C"),val=c(1,1,2,2,3,3))  
df2 <- data.frame(grp=c("A","A","B","B","C","C"),val=c(1,4,3,5,1,2))  
ggplot(df, aes(x=grp, y=val)) +   
    geom_bar(stat="identity", alpha=0.75) +  
    geom_bar(data=df2, aes(x=grp, y=val), stat="identity", position="dodge")
r ggplot2
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1 Answer

22

You can get group totals in many ways. One of them is

with(df, tapply(val, grp, sum))

For simplicity, you can combine bar and line data into a single dataset.

df_all <- data.frame(grp = factor(levels(df$grp)))
df_all$bar_heights <- with(df, tapply(val, grp, sum))
df_all$line_y <- with(df2, tapply(val, grp, sum))

Bar charts use a categorical x-axis. To overlay a line you will need to convert the axis to be numeric.

ggplot(df_all) +
   geom_bar(aes(x = grp, weight = bar_heights)) +
   geom_line(aes(x = as.numeric(grp), y = line_y))

enter image description here

answered 2010-12-02T15:51:24.197

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