3.3 Making a Bar Graph of Counts

3.3.1 Problem

Your data has one row representing each case, and you want plot counts of the cases.

3.3.2 Solution

Use geom_bar() without mapping anything to y (Figure 3.7):

# Equivalent to using geom_bar(stat = "bin")
ggplot(diamonds, aes(x = cut)) +
  geom_bar()
Bar graph of counts

Figure 3.7: Bar graph of counts

3.3.3 Discussion

The diamonds data set has 53,940 rows, each of which represents information about a single diamond:

diamonds
#> # A tibble: 53,940 × 10
#>   carat cut       color clarity depth table price     x     y     z
#>   <dbl> <ord>     <ord> <ord>   <dbl> <dbl> <int> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl>
#> 1  0.23 Ideal     E     SI2      61.5    55   326  3.95  3.98  2.43
#> 2  0.21 Premium   E     SI1      59.8    61   326  3.89  3.84  2.31
#> 3  0.23 Good      E     VS1      56.9    65   327  4.05  4.07  2.31
#> 4  0.29 Premium   I     VS2      62.4    58   334  4.2   4.23  2.63
#> 5  0.31 Good      J     SI2      63.3    58   335  4.34  4.35  2.75
#> 6  0.24 Very Good J     VVS2     62.8    57   336  3.94  3.96  2.48
#> # ℹ 53,934 more rows

With geom_bar(), the default behavior is to use stat = "bin", which counts up the number of cases for each group (each x position, in this example). In the graph we can see that there are about 23,000 cases with an ideal cut.

In this example, the variable on the x-axis is discrete. If we use a continuous variable on the x-axis, we’ll get a bar at each unique x value in the data, as shown in Figure 3.8, left:

Bar graph of counts on a continuous axis (left); A histogram (right)Bar graph of counts on a continuous axis (left); A histogram (right)

Figure 3.8: Bar graph of counts on a continuous axis (left); A histogram (right)

The bar graph with a continuous x-axis is similar to a histogram, but not the same. A histogram is shown on the right of Figure 3.8. In this kind of bar graph, each bar represents a unique x value, whereas in a histogram, each bar represents a range of x values.

3.3.4 See Also

If, instead of having ggplot() count up the number of rows in each group, you have a column in your data frame representing the y values, use geom_col(). See Recipe 3.1.

You could also get the same graphical output by calculating the counts before sending the data to ggplot(). See Recipe 15.17 for more on summarizing data.

For more about histograms, see Recipe 6.1.