How to specify different colors with ggplot
You do this in two steps:
First, you define the groups that should have different colours; either by adding another column to the data frame or inside aes
. I’ll use aes
here:
aes(wt, mpg, color = cut(mpg, breaks = c(0, 20, 25, Inf)))
Secondly, by specifying a manual colour or fill scale:
scale_color_manual(values = c('blue', 'green', 'red'),
limits = c('(0,20]', '(20,25]', '(25,Inf]'))
This specifies which colours to use (values
) and which labels to assign them to (limits
); these are the names of the grouping generated by cut
.
Taken together:
ggplot(mtcars) +
aes(wt, mpg, color = cut(mpg, breaks = c(0, 20, 25, Inf))) +
geom_point(size = 4) +
scale_color_manual(values = c('blue', 'green', 'red'),
limits = c('(0,20]', '(20,25]', '(25,Inf]'))
You can improve the legend title by adding the grouping as a separate column to your data, or by providing a guides
function call:
guides(color = guide_legend(title = 'mpg range'))
Sure it can, although this type of work if probably best suited to working with your data frame before ggplot()
. You could use ifelse()
like this:
library(ggplot2)
p <- ggplot(mtcars, aes(wt, mpg))
p + geom_point(size = 4,
aes(color = ifelse(mpg > 25, "> 25",
ifelse(mpg > 20, "20-25", "< 20")))) +
scale_color_manual(values = c("> 25" = "red", "< 20" = "blue", "20-25" = "green"),
name = "MPG" )
You don't need to call guides()
to create a title you can pass it to the name = ..
argument in scale_color_manual()