Making this plot more readable-CodePudding

I have created the following plot:

From a bigger version (5 rows, 58 columns) of this df:

df <- data.frame(row.names = c("ROBERT", "FRANK", "MICHELLE", "KATE"), `1` = c(31, 87, 22, 12), `2` = c(37, 74, 33, 20), `3` = c(35, 32, 44, 14))
colnames(df) <- c("1", "2", "3")

In the following manner:

df = df %>% 
  rownames_to_column("Name") %>% 
  as.data.frame()

df <- melt(df ,  id.vars = 'Name', variable.name = 'ep')
ggplot(df, aes(ep,value))   geom_line(aes(colour = Name, group=Name))

The plot kind of shows what I'd like to, but it really is a mess. Does anyone have a suggestion that would help me increasing its readability? Any help is very much appreciated!

CodePudding user response：

If your readability concern is just the x axis labels, then I think the main issue is that when you use reshape2::melt() the result is that the column ep is a factor which means that the x axis of your plot will show all the levels and get crowded. The solution is to convert it to numeric and then it will adjust the labels in a sensible way.

I replace your use of reshape2::melt() with tidyr::pivot_longer() which has superseded it within the {tidyverse} but your original code would still work.

library(tidyverse)

df <- structure(list(`1` = c(31, 87, 22, 12), `2` = c(37, 74, 33, 20), `3` = c(35, 32, 44, 14)), class = "data.frame", row.names = c("ROBERT", "FRANK", "MICHELLE", "KATE"))

df %>% 
  rownames_to_column("Name") %>% 
  pivot_longer(-Name, names_to = "ep") %>%
  mutate(ep = as.numeric(ep)) %>% 
  ggplot(aes(ep, value, color = Name))  
  geom_line()

^{Created on 2022-03-07 by the}

Simulated data:

library(tidyr)
library(dplyr)
set.seed(1)

df <- expand_grid(
    Name = c("ROBERT", "FRANK", "MICHELLE", "KATE", "COREY"),
    ep = 1:58
  ) %>% 
  mutate(value = sample(0:130, nrow(.), replace = TRUE))