How to put dates on x axis with ggplot?

Question

Let's consider data :

library(quantmod)
library(ggplot2)
start <- as.Date("2013-01-01")
end <- as.Date("2016-10-01")
# Apple stock
getSymbols("AAPL", src = "yahoo", from = start, to = end)
apple <- AAPL$AAPL.Close

I want to plot apple variable using ggplot, so :

ggplot()+aes(x=1:length(apple), y = apple)+geom_line()

However I don't know how to put dates on x axis instead of number of observation. Dates are stored in AAPL data frame :

head(AAPL)
           AAPL.Open AAPL.High AAPL.Low AAPL.Close AAPL.Volume AAPL.Adjusted
2013-01-02  19.77929  19.82143 19.34393   19.60821   560518000      17.06525
2013-01-03  19.56714  19.63107 19.32143   19.36071   352965200      16.84985
2013-01-04  19.17750  19.23679 18.77964   18.82143   594333600      16.38050
2013-01-07  18.64286  18.90357 18.40000   18.71071   484156400      16.28414
2013-01-08  18.90036  18.99607 18.61607   18.76107   458707200      16.32798
2013-01-09  18.66071  18.75036 18.42822   18.46786   407604400      16.07279

But I don't know how to extract those dates. Do you hany any idea how it can be done ?

This is not a minimal reproducible verifiable example: cf. minimal reproducible example — Bernhard
– Bernhard, Commented Jan 2, 2021 at 13:47
Could you please explain more why you think my question does not match requirments ? I read what you sent and I don't know exactly what do you mean by 'minimal reproducible verifable example' — John
– John, Commented Jan 2, 2021 at 13:54
My comment is no longer since you fixed/editef the question afterwards.Not important anyways since you accepted an answer. — Bernhard
– Bernhard, Commented Jan 2, 2021 at 19:08

Ian Campbell · Accepted Answer · 2021-01-02 14:17:08Z

2

In a zoo object, the dates are stored in custom attributes, but that won't work easily with ggplot.

class(apple)
[1] "xts" "zoo"

You can actually access those dates with the zoo::index function:

head(zoo::index(apple))
[1] "2013-01-02" "2013-01-03" "2013-01-04" "2013-01-07" "2013-01-08" "2013-01-09"

Another approach is to convert to a data frame which will place the dates into the row names and then convert those row names to a column with tibble::rownames_to_column:

library(dplyr)
library(tibble)
apple %>%
  as.data.frame() %>%
  rownames_to_column("Date") %>%
  mutate(Date = as.Date(Date)) %>%
ggplot(aes(x = Date, y = AAPL.Close)) +
  geom_line()

edited Jan 2, 2021 at 14:17

answered Jan 2, 2021 at 14:10

Ian Campbell

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G. Grothendieck · Accepted Answer · 2021-01-03 12:33:58Z

2

Use autoplot.zoo as shown below. Replace Cl with Ad if you want the adjusted close.

See ?autoplot.zoo for more info.

library(ggplot2)
library(quantmod)

getSymbols("AAPL")
autoplot(Cl(AAPL))

It would be possible to customize the X axis, e.g.

autoplot(Cl(AAPL)) + scale_x_date(date_labels = "%Y", breaks = "year")

but the default without that may be sufficient.

Here is the output using the default.

edited Jan 3, 2021 at 12:33

answered Jan 2, 2021 at 18:07

G. Grothendieck

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