Sample comparison with ggplot2-CodePudding

In this example, I want compare population in USA versus China, over time.

library(tidyverse)

population %>%
  filter(country %in% c("United States of America", "China")) %>%
  pivot_wider(names_from = country, values_from = population) %>%
  rename(USA = `United States of America`) %>%
  ggplot(aes(x = China, y = USA))   geom_point(aes(col = year))

Is there a better way to do this (without using pivot_wider)? Or is this the right way?

Thanks in advance

CodePudding user response：

Not sure if this is still what you want, but I'd expect th comparison between two population sizes over time to look something like this:

library(ggplot2)
library(dplyr)

population %>%
  filter(country %in% c("United States of America", "China")) %>%
  ggplot(aes(x = year, y = population, color=country))  
  geom_line()  
  expand_limits(y=0)

Returns:

CodePudding user response：

It is the right way if you want to show how the population of USA varies as a function of the population of China... but what's the sense of it? Probably what you want is to compare how the two population change as a function of time, then I think you'd be better off with a bar chart:

library(tidyverse)
population %>%
  filter(country %in% c("United States of America", "China")) %>%
  ggplot(aes(x = year, y=population, fill=country))   
  geom_col(position="dodge")

^{Created on 2021-09-28 by the reprex package (v2.0.1)}