How do I plot months with integer values using ggplot?

Question

I have the following dataframe:

months = c(1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12)        
totals = c(437318,406597,454125,432062,443323,414061,418627,428530,400509,427900,378849,344718)
test_df = data.frame(months, totals)

I created a plot using the following code:

test_df %>%
  ggplot(aes(x=months, y=totals)) +
  geom_bar(stat='identity', fill='red3') +
  scale_y_continuous(breaks=scales::breaks_extended(n=10)) +
  ggtitle('Amount by Month') +
  ylab('Amount') +
  xlab('Month')

ggplot is assuming that the x-axis contains a continuous variable. I assume this is because the test_df$months is of integer type. I tried editing my plot code by first creating an array of month names:

months = c('Jan','Feb','Mar','Apr','May','Jun','Jul','Aug','Sep','Oct','Nov','Dec')

and then adding this to the plot code:

scale_x_discrete('Month', months)

but this didn't work.

How can I get the x-axis to be displayed with either integer values for the month or month names?

Ronak Shah · Accepted Answer · 2020-11-12 02:02:44Z

2

You can use the inbuilt vector month.abb :

library(dplyr)
library(ggplot2)

test_df %>%
  mutate(months = factor(month.abb[months], levels = month.abb)) %>%
  ggplot(aes(x=months, y=totals)) +
  geom_bar(stat='identity', fill='red3') +
  scale_y_continuous(breaks=scales::breaks_extended(n=10)) +
  ggtitle('Amount by Month') +
  ylab('Amount') +
  xlab('Month')

answered Nov 12, 2020 at 2:02

Ronak Shah

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5 Comments

IamWarmduscher Over a year ago

That's awesome. How would you adjust my original code to simply display the number of the month (1,2,...,12)?

Ronak Shah Over a year ago

For that you can convert months to factor and it should show 1, 2, ...12 instead of values like 2.5 7.5 etc.

IamWarmduscher Over a year ago

There's no way of initially setting the x-axis variable to be discrete instead continuous?

Ronak Shah Over a year ago

months variable is continuous by converting it to factor we are making it to discrete.

IamWarmduscher Over a year ago

I got the month numbers to work with factor. Thanks you.

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