Ggplotly

Plotly is a graphing library that allows you to create interactive charts and maps. These are in the form of html files.

This works with python, R, ggplot2, and other languages. You can create plots with plotly’s own library in R. However, we’ll demonstrate how to plotlyify plots with ggplot2 using ggplotly().

The package plotly is separate to tidyverse and therefore needs installing. Install instruction.

Once installed you can load the library.

Plotly ggplotly refernce page

Dataset

For demonstration we’ll load the mushroom_tbl data from the mgrtibbles package (hyperlink includes install instructions). We will extract a random sample of 150 rows with slice_sample().

mushroom_tbl details

#Load package
library("mgrtibbles")
#Set seed for random sampling
set.seed("483")
#mushroom_tbl tibble for demonstration
mushroom_tbl <- mgrtibbles::mushroom_tbl |>
    #Random sample of 150 rows
    dplyr::slice_sample(n = 150, replace=FALSE)
#Reset random seed to normal operation
set.seed(NULL)

Scatter plot

To create a plotly plot from a ggplot we first create a ggplot pbject

Create a scatter plot of stem_height (y) against stem_width (x).

scatterplot <- mushroom_tbl |>
    ggplot2::ggplot(aes(x = stem_width, y = stem_height)) +
        ggplot2::geom_point()

Next we can pipe the ggplot object to the function plotly::ggplotly().

The html based plot is interactive allowing you to:

Zoom in horizontally, vertically, or with both axes.
Rest the zoom with the home () symbol on the top right.

scatterplot |> plotly::ggplotly()