flexdashboard
Plotly is a flexible framework for producing interactive graphics; it
has a variety of implementations, including one for R. We’ll take a look
at a few common plot types, and then introduce
flexdashboards
as a way to collect plots (either static or
interactive).
This is the second module in the Interactivity topic.
Create interactive graphics using plot.ly and design a data dashboard
using flexdashboard
.
For this example, I’ll create a new .Rmd file that knits to .html in
the repo / R Project holding the website I made in making websites. In addition to some
usual packages, I’ll load plotly
.
library(tidyverse)
library(p8105.datasets)
library(plotly)
##
## Attaching package: 'plotly'
## The following object is masked from 'package:ggplot2':
##
## last_plot
## The following object is masked from 'package:stats':
##
## filter
## The following object is masked from 'package:graphics':
##
## layout
We’re going to focus on the Airbnb data for this topic. The code below extracts what we need right now; specifically, we select only a few of the variables and filter to include a subset of the data. In part, this makes sure that the resulting dataset and plots are computationally feasible – for large datasets, you may need to downsample.
data(nyc_airbnb)
nyc_airbnb =
nyc_airbnb %>%
mutate(rating = review_scores_location / 2) %>%
select(
neighbourhood_group, neighbourhood, rating, price, room_type, lat, long) %>%
filter(
!is.na(rating),
neighbourhood_group == "Manhattan",
room_type == "Entire home/apt",
price %in% 100:500)
We’ll use this dataset as the basis for our plots.
There are several practical differences comparing ggplot
and plot_ly
, but the underlying conceptual framework is
similar. We need to define a dataset, specify how variables map to plot
elements, and pick a plot type.
Below we’re plotting the location (latitude and longitude) of the
rentals in our dataset, and mapping price
to color. We also
define a new variable text_label
and map that to text.
The type of plot is scatter
, which has several “modes”:
markers
produces the same kind of plot as
ggplot::geom_point
, lines
produces the same
kind of plot as ggplot::geom_line
.
nyc_airbnb %>%
mutate(text_label = str_c("Price: $", price, "\nRating: ", rating)) %>%
plot_ly(
x = ~lat, y = ~long, type = "scatter", mode = "markers",
color = ~price, text = ~text_label, alpha = 0.5)
This can be a useful way to show the data – it gives additional information on hovering and allows you to zoom in or out, for example.
Next up is the boxplot. The process for creating the boxplot is
similar to above: define the dataset, specify the mappings, pick a plot
type. Here the type is box
, and there aren’t modes to
choose from.
nyc_airbnb %>%
mutate(neighbourhood = fct_reorder(neighbourhood, price)) %>%
plot_ly(y = ~price, color = ~neighbourhood, type = "box", colors = "viridis")
Again, this can be helpful – we have a five-number summary when we hover, and by clicking we can select groups we want to include or exclude.
Lastly, we’ll make a bar chart. Plotly expects data in a specific
format for bar charts, so we use count
to get the number of
rentals in each neighborhood (i.e. to get the bar height). Otherwise,
the process should seem pretty familiar …
nyc_airbnb %>%
count(neighbourhood) %>%
mutate(neighbourhood = fct_reorder(neighbourhood, n)) %>%
plot_ly(x = ~neighbourhood, y = ~n, color = ~neighbourhood, type = "bar", colors = "viridis")
Interactivity in bar charts is kinda neat, but needs a bit more justification – you can zoom, which helps in some cases, or you could build in some addition information in hover text.
You can convert a ggplot
object straight to an
interactive graphic using ggplotly
.
For example, the code below recreates our scatterplot using
ggplot
followed by ggplotly
.
scatter_ggplot =
nyc_airbnb %>%
ggplot(aes(x = lat, y = long, color = price)) +
geom_point(alpha = 0.25) +
coord_cartesian()
ggplotly(scatter_ggplot)