I have a dataframe (dat
) with two columns 1) Month
and 2) Value
. I would like to highlight that the x-axis is not continuous in my boxplot by interrupting the x-axis with two angled lines on the x-axis that are empty between the angled lines.
Example Data and Boxplot
library(ggplot2)
set.seed(321)
dat <- data.frame(matrix(ncol = 2, nrow = 18))
x <- c("Month", "Value")
colnames(dat) <- x
dat$Month <- rep(c(1,2,3,10,11,12),3)
dat$Value <- rnorm(18,20,2)
ggplot(data = dat, aes(x = factor(Month), y = Value)) +
geom_boxplot() +
labs(x = "Month") +
theme_bw() +
theme(panel.grid = element_blank(),
text = element_text(size = 16),
axis.text.x = element_text(size = 14, color = "black"),
axis.text.y = element_text(size = 14, color = "black"))
The ideal figure would look something like below. How can I make this discontinuous axis in ggplot?
You could make use of the extended axis guides in the ggh4x
package. Alas, you won't easily be able to create the "separators" without a hack similar to the one suggested by user Zhiqiang Wang
guide_axis_truncated
accepts vectors to define lower and upper trunks. This also works for units, by the way, then you have to pass the vector inside the unit function (e.g., trunc_lower = unit(c(0,.45), "npc")
!
library(ggplot2)
library(ggh4x)
set.seed(321)
dat <- data.frame(matrix(ncol = 2, nrow = 18))
x <- c("Month", "Value")
colnames(dat) <- x
dat$Month <- rep(c(1,2,3,10,11,12),3)
dat$Value <- rnorm(18,20,2)
# this is to make it slightly more programmatic
x1end <- 3.45
x2start <- 3.55
p <-
ggplot(data = dat, aes(x = factor(Month), y = Value)) +
geom_boxplot() +
labs(x = "Month") +
theme_classic() +
theme(axis.line = element_line(colour = "black"))
p +
guides(x = guide_axis_truncated(
trunc_lower = c(-Inf, x2start),
trunc_upper = c(x1end, Inf)
))
Created on 2021-11-01 by the reprex package (v2.0.1)
The below is taking user Zhiqiang Wang's hack a step further. You will see I am using simple trigonometry to calculate the segment coordinates. in order to make the angle actually look as it is defined in the function, you would need to set coord_equal
.
# a simple function to help make the segments
add_separators <- function(x, y = 0, angle = 45, length = .1){
add_y <- length * sin(angle * pi/180)
add_x <- length * cos(angle * pi/180)
## making the list for your segments
myseg <- list(x = x - add_x, xend = x + add_x,
y = rep(y - add_y, length(x)), yend = rep(y + add_y, length(x)))
## this function returns an annotate layer with your segment coordinates
annotate("segment",
x = myseg$x, xend = myseg$xend,
y = myseg$y, yend = myseg$yend)
}
# you will need to set limits for correct positioning of your separators
# I chose 0.05 because this is the expand factor by default
y_sep <- min(dat$Value) -0.05*(min(dat$Value))
p +
guides(x = guide_axis_truncated(
trunc_lower = c(-Inf, x2start),
trunc_upper = c(x1end, Inf)
)) +
add_separators(x = c(x1end, x2start), y = y_sep, angle = 70) +
# you need to set expand to 0
scale_y_continuous(expand = c(0,0)) +
## to make the angle look like specified, you would need to use coord_equal()
coord_cartesian(clip = "off", ylim = c(y_sep, NA))