Tufte's Box Plot

Source: R/geom-tufteboxplot.R

Edward Tufte's revisions of the box plot as described in The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. This functions provides several box plot variants:

  • A point indicating the median, a gap indicating the interquartile range, and lines for whiskers.

  • An offset line indicating the interquartile range and a gap indicating the median.

  • A line indicating the interquartile range, a gap indicating the median, and points indicating the minimum and maximum values

  • A wide line indicating the interquartile range, a gap indicating the median, and lines indicating the minimum and maximum.

geom_tufteboxplot(
  mapping = NULL,
  data = NULL,
  stat = "fivenumber",
  position = "dodge",
  outlier.colour = "black",
  outlier.shape = 19,
  outlier.size = 1.5,
  outlier.stroke = 0.5,
  voffset = 0.01,
  hoffset = 0.005,
  na.rm = FALSE,
  show.legend = NA,
  inherit.aes = TRUE,
  median.type = "point",
  whisker.type = "line",
  ...
)

Arguments

mapping

Set of aesthetic mappings created by aes(). If specified and inherit.aes = TRUE (the default), it is combined with the default mapping at the top level of the plot. You must supply mapping if there is no plot mapping.

data

The data to be displayed in this layer. There are three options:

If NULL, the default, the data is inherited from the plot data as specified in the call to ggplot().

A data.frame, or other object, will override the plot data. All objects will be fortified to produce a data frame. See fortify() for which variables will be created.

A function will be called with a single argument, the plot data. The return value must be a data.frame, and will be used as the layer data. A function can be created from a formula (e.g. ~ head(.x, 10)).

stat

The statistical transformation to use on the data for this layer, as a string. The default (stat = 'fivenumber') calls stat_fivenumber and produces whiskers that extend from the interquartile range to the extremes of the data; specifying stat_boxplot will produce a more traditional boxplot with whiskers extending to the most extreme points that are < 1.5 IQR away from the hinges (i.e., the first and third quartiles).

position

Position adjustment, either as a string naming the adjustment (e.g. "jitter" to use position_jitter), or the result of a call to a position adjustment function. Use the latter if you need to change the settings of the adjustment.

outlier.colour

colour for outlying points

outlier.shape

shape of outlying points

outlier.size

size of outlying points

outlier.stroke

stroke for outlying points

voffset

controls the size of the gap in the line representing the median when median.type = 'line'. This is a fraction of the range of y.

hoffset

controls how much the interquartile line is offset from the whiskers when median.type = 'line'. This is a fraction of the range of x.

na.rm

If FALSE, the default, missing values are removed with a warning. If TRUE, missing values are silently removed.

show.legend

logical. Should this layer be included in the legends? NA, the default, includes if any aesthetics are mapped. FALSE never includes, and TRUE always includes. It can also be a named logical vector to finely select the aesthetics to display.

inherit.aes

If FALSE, overrides the default aesthetics, rather than combining with them. This is most useful for helper functions that define both data and aesthetics and shouldn't inherit behaviour from the default plot specification, e.g. borders().

median.type

If 'point', then the median is represented by a point, and the interquartile range by a gap in the line. If median.type='line', then the interquartile range is represented by a line, possibly offset, and the median by a gap in the line.

whisker.type

If 'line', then whiskers are represented by lines. If 'point', then whiskers are represented by points at ymin and ymax.

...

Other arguments passed on to layer(). These are often aesthetics, used to set an aesthetic to a fixed value, like colour = "red" or size = 3. They may also be parameters to the paired geom/stat.

Aesthetics

  • x [required]

  • y [required]

  • colour

  • size

  • linetype

  • shape

  • fill

  • alpha

References

Tufte, Edward R. (2001) The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Chapter 6.

McGill, R., Tukey, J. W. and Larsen, W. A. (1978) Variations of box plots. The American Statistician 32, 12-16.

See also

geom_boxplot()

Other geom tufte: geom_rangeframe()

Examples

library("ggplot2")

p <- ggplot(mtcars, aes(factor(cyl), mpg))
# with a point for the median and lines for whiskers
p + geom_tufteboxplot()
#> Warning: The following aesthetics were dropped during statistical transformation: y.
#> ℹ This can happen when ggplot fails to infer the correct grouping structure in
#>   the data.
#> ℹ Did you forget to specify a `group` aesthetic or to convert a numerical
#>   variable into a factor?
#> Warning: Using the `size` aesthetic in this geom was deprecated in ggplot2 3.4.0.
#> ℹ Please use `linewidth` in the `default_aes` field and elsewhere instead.
#> Warning: Using the `size` aesthetic with geom_segment was deprecated in ggplot2 3.4.0.
#> ℹ Please use the `linewidth` aesthetic instead.

# with a line for the interquartile range and points for whiskers
p + geom_tufteboxplot(median.type = "line", whisker.type = "point", hoffset = 0)
#> Warning: The following aesthetics were dropped during statistical transformation: y.
#> ℹ This can happen when ggplot fails to infer the correct grouping structure in
#>   the data.
#> ℹ Did you forget to specify a `group` aesthetic or to convert a numerical
#>   variable into a factor?

# with a wide line for the interquartile range and lines for whiskers
p + geom_tufteboxplot(median.type = "line", hoffset = 0, width = 3)
#> Warning: The following aesthetics were dropped during statistical transformation: y.
#> ℹ This can happen when ggplot fails to infer the correct grouping structure in
#>   the data.
#> ℹ Did you forget to specify a `group` aesthetic or to convert a numerical
#>   variable into a factor?
#> Warning: `position_dodge()` requires non-overlapping x intervals.

# with an offset line for the interquartile range and lines for whiskers
p + geom_tufteboxplot(median.type = "line")
#> Warning: The following aesthetics were dropped during statistical transformation: y.
#> ℹ This can happen when ggplot fails to infer the correct grouping structure in
#>   the data.
#> ℹ Did you forget to specify a `group` aesthetic or to convert a numerical
#>   variable into a factor?

# combined with theme_tufte
p + geom_tufteboxplot() +
  theme_tufte() +
  theme(axis.ticks.x = element_blank())
#> Warning: The following aesthetics were dropped during statistical transformation: y.
#> ℹ This can happen when ggplot fails to infer the correct grouping structure in
#>   the data.
#> ℹ Did you forget to specify a `group` aesthetic or to convert a numerical
#>   variable into a factor?

# traditional boxplot with whiskers only out to 1.5 IQR, outlier points
p + geom_tufteboxplot(stat="boxplot", outlier.shape = 5)