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We’ve used ggplots throughout this blog series, but today, I want to introduce another package that helps you customize scales on your ggplots – the scales package. I use this package most frequently to format scales as percent. There aren’t a lot of good ways to use percents with my dataset, but one example would be to calculate the percentage each book contributes to the total pages I read in 2019.
library(tidyverse)

## -- Attaching packages ------------------------------------------- tidyverse 1.3.0 --

##  ggplot2 3.2.1      purrr   0.3.3
##  tibble  2.1.3      dplyr   0.8.3
##  tidyr   1.0.0      stringr 1.4.0

## -- Conflicts ---------------------------------------------- tidyverse_conflicts() --

col_names = TRUE)

## Parsed with column specification:
## cols(
##   Title = col_character(),
##   Pages = col_double(),
##   date_started = col_character(),
##   Book.ID = col_double(),
##   Author = col_character(),
##   AverageRating = col_double(),
##   OriginalPublicationYear = col_double(),
##   MyRating = col_double(),
##   Gender = col_double(),
##   Fiction = col_double(),
##   Childrens = col_double(),
##   Fantasy = col_double(),
##   SciFi = col_double(),
##   Mystery = col_double(),
##   SelfHelp = col_double()
## )

mutate(perpage = Pages/sum(Pages))

The new variable, perpage, is a proportion. But if I display those data with a figure, I want them to be percentages instead. Here’s how to do that. (If you don’t already have the scales package, add install.packages(“scales”) at the beginning of this code.)
library(scales)

##
## Attaching package: 'scales'

## The following object is masked from 'package:purrr':
##

##
##     col_factor

ggplot(aes(perpage)) +
geom_histogram() +
scale_x_continuous(labels = percent, breaks = seq(0,.05,.005)) +
xlab("Percentage of Total Pages Read") +
ylab("Books")

## stat_bin() using bins = 30. Pick better value with binwidth.

You need to make sure you load the scales package before you add the labels = percent attribute, or you’ll get an error message. Alternatively, you can tell R to use the scales package just for this attribute by adding scales:: before percent. This trick becomes useful when you have lots of packages loaded that use the same function names, because R will use the most recently loaded package for that function, and mask it from any other packages.

This post also seems like a great opportunity to hop on my statistical highhorse and talk about the difference between a histogram and a bar chart. Why is this important? With everything going on in the world – pandemics, political elections, etc. – I’ve seen lots of comments on others’ intelligence, many of which show a misunderstanding of the most well-known histogram: the standard normal curve. You see, raw data, even from a huge number of people and even on a standardized test, like a cognitive ability (aka: IQ) test, is never as clean or pretty as it appears in a histogram.

Histograms use a process called “binning”, where ranges of scores are combined to form one of the bars. The bins can be made bigger (including a larger range of scores) or smaller, and smaller bins will start showing the jagged nature of most data, even so-called normally distributed data.

As one example, let’s show what my percent figure would look like as a bar chart instead of a histogram (like the one above).
reads2019 %>%
ggplot(aes(perpage)) +
geom_bar() +
scale_x_continuous(labels = percent, breaks = seq(0,.05,.005)) +
xlab("Percentage of Total Pages Read") +
ylab("Books")

As you can see, lots of books were binned together for the histogram. I can customize the number of bins in my histogram, but unless I set it to give one bin to each x value, the result will be much cleaner than the bar chart. The same is true for cognitive ability scores. Each bar is a bin, and that bin contains a range of values. So when we talk about scores on a standardized test, we’re really referring to a range of scores.

Now, my reading dataset is small – only 87 observations. What happens if I generate a large, random dataset?
set.seed(42)

test <- tibble(ID = c(1:10000),
value = rnorm(10000))

test %>%
ggplot(aes(value)) +
geom_histogram()

## stat_bin() using bins = 30. Pick better value with binwidth.

See that “stat_bin()” warning message? It’s telling me that there are 30 bins, so R divided up the range of scores into 30 equally sized bins. What happens when I increase the number of bins? Let’s go really crazy and have it create one bin for each score value.
library(magrittr)

##
## Attaching package: 'magrittr'

## The following object is masked from 'package:purrr':
##
##     set_names

## The following object is masked from 'package:tidyr':
##
##     extract

test %$% n_distinct(value) ## [1] 10000 test %>% ggplot(aes(value)) + geom_histogram(bins = 10000)  Not nearly so pretty, is it? Mind you, this is 10,000 values randomly generated to follow the normal distribution. When you give each value a bin, it doesn’t look very normally distributed. How about if we mimic cognitive ability scores, with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15? I’ll even force it to have whole numbers, so we don’t have decimal places to deal with. CogAbil <- tibble(Person = c(1:10000), Ability = rnorm(10000, mean = 100, sd = 15)) CogAbil <- CogAbil %>% mutate(Ability = round(Ability, digits = 0)) CogAbil %$%
n_distinct(Ability)

## [1] 103

CogAbil %>%
ggplot(aes(Ability)) +
geom_histogram() +
labs(title = "With 30 bins") +
theme(plot.title = element_text(hjust = 0.5))

## stat_bin() using bins = 30. Pick better value with binwidth.

CogAbil %>%
ggplot(aes(Ability)) +
geom_histogram(bins = 103) +
labs(title = "With 1 bin per whole-point score") +
theme(plot.title = element_text(hjust = 0.5))

(Now, there’s more that goes into developing a cognitive ability test, because the original scale of the test (raw scores) differ from the standardized scale that is applied to turn raw scores into one with a mean of 100 and standard deviation of 15. That’s where an entire field’s worth of knowledge (psychometrics) comes in.)

This is not to say histograms lie – they simplify. And they’re not really meant to be used the way many people try to use them.