Zoom Your Plots with ggforce

Mar 28, 2022 1 min read R, tidyverse, ggplot2, scatterplot

To enlarge a section of data in your ggplots, use the facet_zoom function in the ggforce package. To illustrate I am using the gapminder dataset in gapminder package.

Load necessary

library(tidyverse)
library(RColorBrewer)
library(ggforce)
library(gapminder)

Set the theme for plots

theme_set(theme_bw())

Zoom according to a continuous scale variable

zoom the Y axis

ggplot(gapminder, aes(y=lifeExp, x=gdpPercap)) + geom_point() + coord_fixed() +  
  facet_zoom(ylim = c(60, 80))

zoom the X axis

ggplot(gapminder, aes(y=lifeExp, x=gdpPercap)) + geom_point() + coord_fixed() +   
  facet_zoom(xlim = c(0, 10000))

zoom the X axis and the Y axis

ggplot(gapminder, aes(y=lifeExp, x=gdpPercap)) + geom_point() + coord_fixed() +  
  facet_zoom(xlim = c(0, 10000), ylim=c(60, 80))

Zoom according to a qualitative variable

zoom the Y axis

ggplot(gapminder, aes(y=lifeExp, x=gdpPercap, col=continent)) + geom_point() + 
  coord_fixed() + 
  scale_color_brewer(palette = "Dark2") +
  facet_zoom(y = continent == 'Oceania')

zoom the X axis

ggplot(gapminder, aes(y=lifeExp, x=gdpPercap, col=continent)) + geom_point() + 
  coord_fixed() + 
  scale_color_brewer(palette = "Dark2") +
  facet_zoom(x = continent == 'Oceania')

zoom the X axis and the Y axis

ggplot(gapminder, aes(y=lifeExp, x=gdpPercap, col=continent)) + geom_point() + 
  coord_fixed() + 
  scale_color_brewer(palette = "Dark2") +
  facet_zoom(xy = continent == 'Oceania') 

ggplot(gapminder, aes(y=lifeExp, x=gdpPercap, col=continent)) + geom_point() + 
  coord_fixed() + 
  scale_color_brewer(palette = "Dark2") +
  facet_zoom(xy = continent == 'Oceania', split = TRUE)

R tidyverse ggplot2
Avatar
Thiyanga S. Talagala
PhD in Statistics

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