Scales that Focus Specific Levels in your ggplot()

A 'ggplot2' extension that provides tools for automatically creating scales to focus on subgroups of the data plotted without losing other information.

Introduction

Many times during data analysis, one may want to visualize data for a specific subgroup of observations. While ggplot is great for data visualization in general, constructing graphics that focus on those subgroups may need very troublesome manipulation of data and graphical scales (for example colors), i.e. setting low alpha for unimportant observations, coloring things in a way that highlights the focus subgroup, etc.

ggfocus allows you to build graphics that focus on those specific subgroups by doing the scale manipulation automatically while keeping all the flexibility from ggplot. The idea behind this approach is from this issue from tidyverse/ggplot2.

Installing ggfocus

The package is available on CRAN, but you can also install the latest version from github with devtools.

devtools::install_github("Freguglia/ggfocus") # Latest version
install.packages("ggfocus") # CRAN version

Usage

ggfocus implements the ggfocus() function.

ggfocus(p, var, focus_levels, focus_aes = c("color", "alpha"),
  color_focus = NULL, color_other = "black", alpha_focus = 1,
  alpha_other = 0.05)

• p: a ggplot.
• var: the factor variable that you want to specify levels to focus (note that this can be a numeric variable that represents a factor, i.e., you gave an integer number to each 'level', like an integer ID or a character variable).
• focus_levels: a vector of levels (either character or numeric) to highlight.
• focus_aes: which aesthetics should be used to highlight the levels. Currently only color, alpha and fill are available. A character vector is expected.
• color_focus: what color selected levels should have? It can be either one color (all equal) or character vector with one color for each level. This affects both color and fill.
• color_other: color for levels not selected.
• alpha_focus and alpha_other: alpha for selcted and not selected levels, respectively.

You can also use the usual ggplot2 grammar + to add scales with the family of function scale_*_focus(). These two uses are equivalent, read the vignette for more information.

Examples

Using the gapminder dataset, first we create our ggplot

library(ggplot2)
library(gapminder)
p <- ggplot(gapminder, aes(x=log(gdpPercap), y=lifeExp, group=country)) + geom_line()
p

Now we can use ggfocus() to highlight European countries only.

library(ggfocus)
ggfocus(p, continent, "Europe")

We can also highlight countries

ggfocus(p, country, c("Brazil","Argentina"), color_focus = c("Green","Blue"))

Because ggfocus() retuns a modified ggplot object, other ggplot extensions can used with it, for example, ggmap.

library(ggmap)
library(maps)

wm <- map_data("world")
p <- ggplot(wm, aes(x=long, y = lat, group = group)) + geom_polygon(color="black") + theme_void()
ggfocus(p, region, c("Brazil","India","Italy","Canada"),focus_aes = c("fill","alpha"),
        color_focus = "blue", alpha_other = 0.15) + guides(fill=FALSE)

Contributing and Bug Reports

• If you find any unexpected result or bug, please file an issue with a reproducible example.
• For new features, for example, the addition of the focus scale for a new aesthetics, file and issue and add and example or a brief explanation with important aspects for the focus scale of this new aesthetics.
• If you want to contribute somehow, please contact me or file an issue so we can coordinate.