Dumbbell charts

The dumbbell geom is used to create dumbbell charts.

geom_dumbbell(mapping = NULL, data = NULL, ..., colour_x = NULL,
  size_x = NULL, colour_xend = NULL, size_xend = NULL,
  dot_guide = FALSE, dot_guide_size = NULL, dot_guide_colour = NULL,
  na.rm = FALSE, show.legend = NA, inherit.aes = TRUE,
  position = "identity")

Arguments

mapping	Set of aesthetic mappings created by aes() or aes_(). If specified and inherit.aes = TRUE (the default), it is combined with the default mapping at the top level of the plot. You must supply mapping if there is no plot mapping.
data	The data to be displayed in this layer. There are three options: If NULL, the default, the data is inherited from the plot data as specified in the call to ggplot(). A data.frame, or other object, will override the plot data. All objects will be fortified to produce a data frame. See fortify() for which variables will be created. A function will be called with a single argument, the plot data. The return value must be a data.frame, and will be used as the layer data.
...	other arguments passed on to layer. These are often aesthetics, used to set an aesthetic to a fixed value, like color = "red" or size = 3. They may also be parameters to the paired geom/stat.
colour_x	the colour of the start point
size_x	the size of the start point
colour_xend	the colour of the end point
size_xend	the size of the end point
dot_guide	if TRUE, a leading dotted line will be placed before the left-most dumbbell point
dot_guide_size, dot_guide_colour	singe-value aesthetics for dot_guide
na.rm	If FALSE (the default), removes missing values with a warning. If TRUE silently removes missing values.
show.legend	logical. Should this layer be included in the legends? NA, the default, includes if any aesthetics are mapped. FALSE never includes, and TRUE always includes. It can also be a named logical vector to finely select the aesthetics to display.
inherit.aes	If FALSE, overrides the default aesthetics, rather than combining with them. This is most useful for helper functions that define both data and aesthetics and shouldn't inherit behaviour from the default plot specification, e.g. borders().
position	Position adjustment, either as a string, or the result of a call to a position adjustment function.

Details

Dumbbell dot plots — dot plots with two or more series of data — are an alternative to the clustered bar chart or slope graph.

Aesthetics

@section Aesthetics: geom_segment() understands the following aesthetics (required aesthetics are in bold):

• x

• y

• xend

• yend

• alpha

• colour

• group

• linetype

• size

Learn more about setting these aesthetics in vignette("ggplot2-specs").

Examples

library(ggplot2)

df <- data.frame(trt=LETTERS[1:5], l=c(20, 40, 10, 30, 50), r=c(70, 50, 30, 60, 80))

ggplot(df, aes(y=trt, x=l, xend=r)) +
  geom_dumbbell(size=3, color="#e3e2e1",
                colour_x = "#5b8124", colour_xend = "#bad744",
                dot_guide=TRUE, dot_guide_size=0.25) +
  labs(x=NULL, y=NULL, title="ggplot2 geom_dumbbell with dot guide") +
  theme_minimal() +
  theme(panel.grid.major.x=element_line(size=0.05))

## with vertical dodging
df2 <- data.frame(trt = c(LETTERS[1:5], "D"),
                 l = c(20, 40, 10, 30, 50, 40),
                 r = c(70, 50, 30, 60, 80, 70))

ggplot(df2, aes(y=trt, x=l, xend=r)) +
  geom_dumbbell(size=3, color="#e3e2e1",
                colour_x = "#5b8124", colour_xend = "#bad744",
                dot_guide=TRUE, dot_guide_size=0.25,
                position=position_dodgev(height=0.4)) +
  labs(x=NULL, y=NULL, title="ggplot2 geom_dumbbell with dot guide") +
  theme_minimal() +
  theme(panel.grid.major.x=element_line(size=0.05))