First Plot demonstration

This is a demonstration showing how to make your first plot using R, Rstudio, and ggplot.

Steps:

• Be sure you are using the tidyverse and gapminder libraries (and that they are installed on your computer).
• Create a ggplot using the data gapminder and a mapping between data and aesthetic features. For example put GDP per capita on the x axis and life expectancy on the y axis.
• Make a scatterplot using geom_point

ggplot(gapminder, aes(x = gdpPercap, y = lifeExp)) + geom_point()

ggplot(gapminder, aes(y = gdpPercap, x = lifeExp)) + geom_point()

Refine your plot:

• Add axis labels using labs and the arguments x, y, title, subtitle, caption, tag (some of these are optional and not always needed.)
• Use theme to make the text bigger by setting the size property of text with the element_text function.
• Add colour to the plot. Change the label for your colour scale.
• Transform the x axis to be on a log scale using scale_x_log10

ggplot(gapminder, aes(y = gdpPercap, 
                      x = lifeExp)) + 
  geom_point() +
  labs(x = "GDP per capita (US$, inflation adjusted",
       y = "Life expectancy (years, at birth)",
       title = "Life expectancy varies with national income",
       subtitle = "Something more here",
       caption = "Source: gapminder")

ggplot(gapminder, aes(y = gdpPercap, 
                      x = lifeExp,
                      color = continent),
       ) + 
  geom_point() +
  labs(y = "GDP per capita (US$, inflation adjusted",
       x = "Life expectancy (years, at birth)",
       title = "Life expectancy varies with national income",
       subtitle = "Something more here",
       caption = "Source: gapminder")

ggplot(gapminder, aes(y = gdpPercap, 
                      x = lifeExp,
                      color = continent),
       ) + 
  geom_point() +
  labs(y = "GDP per capita (US$, inflation adjusted",
       x = "Life expectancy (years, at birth)",
       title = "Life expectancy varies with national income",
       subtitle = "Something more here",
       caption = "Source: gapminder") +
  scale_y_log10() +
  theme(text = element_text(size=14))

Repeat:

• Do this exercise with another dataset such as mtcars or palmerpenguins.

Refer to the slides for this lesson for more ideas and examples.