Adrian Tam continues a series on R:
One of the most popular plotting libraries in R is not the plotting function in R base, but the ggplot2 library. People use that because it is flexible. This library also works using the philosophy of “grammar of graphics”, which is not to generate a visualization upon a function call, but to define what should be in the plot, and you can refine it further before setting it into a picture. In this post, you will learn about ggplot2 and see some examples. In particular, you will learn:
- How to make use of ggplot2 to create a plot from a dataset
- How to create various charts and graphics with multiple facades using ggplot2
It takes a little while to understand the grammar of graphics approach that ggplot2 takes, but once you do, you realize just how good this library is for generating static images.