In R ggplot is the tidyverse package for drawing figures and graphs. This course follows on from the introductory and advanced R courses and looks in much more detail at how to construct and customise graphs using ggplot. By the end of the course you will be able to produce and save complex, multi-layered plots with custom annotation and colouring.
Pre-Course Requirements & Suggestions
This course assumes that you have knowledge or skills equivalent to those taught in the following courses.
Please ask us if you're unsure if you have the necessary knowledge or skills for this course.
Course Content
Geometries and Aesthetics
To start with we recap the basic structure of a ggplot graph, looking at the requirements for the data used, and reviewing the concepts of geometries and aesthetics and how they can be supplied.
Summarising Geometries
Next we look at some more geometries where one or more of the aesthetics is calculated by the geometry function. We start with barplots and then move to looking at different ways of representing distributions.
Annotation, Scaling and Colours
We now look at how we can customise the default appearance of our plots. We'll look at changing the scaling or labelling of axes as well as changing colours using both ggplot themes and changes to the automatically assigned categorical colours.
Overlays, Facetting and Highlighting
In this final section we look at the use of statistical overlays to add error bars or other data summaries. We look at the creation of multiple plots through the use of facetting, and we see how to apply geometries selectively for labelling or highlighting purposes.