A beeswarm plot or swarmplot is
a type of data visualization that displays individual data points in a
way that they don’t overlap, resulting in a
swarming effect that resembles a swarm of bees.
In
this post, we’ll see how to create a simple beeswarm plot using the beeswarm package. We
will provide reproducible code and examples.
For this post, we need to install and load the beeswarm package.
We can install it from CRAN using
install.packages("beeswarm")
. Then, we can load it:
Since beeswarm plots are made to
visualize individual data points, we need a dataset
that contains numerical values. Here, we’ll use the iris
dataset, which is a built-in dataset in R.
We can easily load it:
## Sepal.Length Sepal.Width Petal.Length Petal.Width Species
## 1 5.1 3.5 1.4 0.2 setosa
## 2 4.9 3.0 1.4 0.2 setosa
## 3 4.7 3.2 1.3 0.2 setosa
## 4 4.6 3.1 1.5 0.2 setosa
## 5 5.0 3.6 1.4 0.2 setosa
## 6 5.4 3.9 1.7 0.4 setosa
The package comes with a beeswarm()
function that
creates a beeswarm plot that can be used with only 1 argument: the
numerical variable to visualize. Here, we’ll use the
Sepal.Length
variable from the iris
dataset.
We can easily flip the plot by setting the horizontal
argument to TRUE
(or vertical
to
FALSE
):
In this post, we learned how to create a simple beeswarm plot using the beeswarm
package. We used the beeswarm()
function to create a basic
plot.
You might be interested in how to custom the dots or how to display several groups on the beeswarm plot.
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