15 Scales and guides

Formally, each scale is a function from a region in data space (the domain of the scale) to a region in aesthetic space (the range of the scale). The axis or legend is the inverse function: it allows you to convert visual properties back to data.

Needs to emphasise orthogonality of various components, and show how things that we showed just for position or colour scales also apply elsewhere.

15.1 Scale specification

An important property of ggplot2 is the principle that every aesthetic in your plot is associated with exactly one scale. For instance, when you write:

ggplot(mpg, aes(displ, hwy)) +
geom_point(aes(colour = class))

ggplot2 added a default scale for each aesthetic used in the plot:

ggplot(mpg, aes(displ, hwy)) +
geom_point(aes(colour = class)) +
scale_x_continuous() +
scale_y_continuous() +
scale_colour_discrete()

The choice of default scale depends on the aesthetic and the variable type. In this example hwy is a continuous variable mapped to the y aesthetic so the default scale is scale_y_continuous(); similarly class is discrete so when mapped to the colour aesthetic the default scale becomes scale_colour_discrete().

Specifying these defaults would be tedious so ggplot2 does it for you. But if you want to override the defaults, you’ll need to add the scale yourself, like this:

ggplot(mpg, aes(displ, hwy)) +
geom_point(aes(colour = class)) +
scale_x_continuous("A really awesome x axis label") +
scale_y_continuous("An amazingly great y axis label")

The use of + to “add” scales to a plot is a little misleading because if you supply two scales for the same aesthetic, the last scale takes precedence. In other words, when you + a scale, you’re not actually adding it to the plot, but overriding the existing scale. This means that the following two specifications are equivalent:

ggplot(mpg, aes(displ, hwy)) +
geom_point() +
scale_x_continuous("Label 1") +
scale_x_continuous("Label 2")
#> Scale for 'x' is already present. Adding another scale for 'x', which will
#> replace the existing scale.
ggplot(mpg, aes(displ, hwy)) +
geom_point() +
scale_x_continuous("Label 2")

Note the message when you add multiple scales for the same aesthetic, which makes it harder to accidentally overwrite an existing scale. If you see this in your own code, you should make sure that you’re only adding one scale to each aesthetic.

If you’re making small tweaks to the scales, you might continue to use the default scales, supplying a few extra arguments. If you want to make more radical changes you will override the default scales with alternatives:

ggplot(mpg, aes(displ, hwy)) +
geom_point(aes(colour = class)) +
scale_x_sqrt() +
scale_colour_brewer()

Here scale_x_sqrt() changes the scale for the x axis scale, and scale_colour_brewer() does the same for the colour scale.

The scale functions intended for users all follow a common naming scheme. You’ve probably already figured out the scheme, but to be concrete, it’s made up of three pieces separated by "_":

1. scale
2. The name of the primary aesthetic (e.g., colour, shape or x)
3. The name of the scale (e.g., continuous, discrete, brewer).

The naming structure is often helpful, but can sometimes be ambiguous. For example, it is immediately clear that scale_x_*() functions apply to the x aesthetic, but it takes a little more thought to recognise that they also govern the behaviour of other aesthetics that describe a horizontal position (e.g., the xmin, xmax, and xend aesthetics). Similarly, while the name scale_colour_continuous() clearly refers to the colour scale associated with a continuous variables, it is less obvious that scale_colour_distiller() is simply a different method for creating colour scales for continuous variables. In this chapter I will try to clarify this structure as much as possible: more generally, the help documentation for each scale function may be helpful.

Before diving into the details of how scale functions work, it is useful to note that internally all scale functions in ggplot2 belong to one of three fundamental types; continuous scales, discrete scales, and binned scales. Each fundamental type is handled by one of three scale constructor functions; continuous_scale(), discrete_scale() and binned_scale(). Although you should never need to call these constructor functions, they form the organising structure for later sections in this chapter.

15.1.1 Exercises

1. Simplify the following plot specifications to make them easier to understand.

ggplot(mpg, aes(displ)) +
scale_y_continuous("Highway mpg") +
scale_x_continuous() +
geom_point(aes(y = hwy))

ggplot(mpg, aes(y = displ, x = class)) +
scale_y_continuous("Displacement (l)") +
scale_x_discrete("Car type") +
scale_x_discrete("Type of car") +
scale_colour_discrete() +
geom_point(aes(colour = drv)) +
scale_colour_discrete("Drive\ntrain")
2. What happens if you pair a discrete variable with a continuous scale? What happens if you pair a continuous variable with a discrete scale?

15.3 Scale transformation

The most common use for scale transformations is to adjust a continuous position scale, as discussed in Section 10.1.9. However, they can sometimes be helpful to when applied to other aesthetics. Often this is purely a matter of visual emphasis. An example of this for the Old Faithful density plot is shown below. The linearly mapped scale on the left makes it easy to see the peaks of the distribution, whereas the transformed representation on the right makes it easier to see the regions of non-negligible density around those peaks:

base <- ggplot(faithfuld, aes(waiting, eruptions)) +
geom_raster(aes(fill = density)) +
scale_x_continuous(NULL, NULL, expand = c(0, 0)) +
scale_y_continuous(NULL, NULL, expand = c(0, 0))

base
base + scale_fill_continuous(trans = "sqrt")

Transforming size aesthetics is also possible:

df <- data.frame(x = runif(20), y = runif(20), z = sample(20))
base <- ggplot(df, aes(x, y, size = z)) + geom_point()

base
base + scale_size(trans = "reverse")

In the plot on the left, the z value is naturally interpreted as a “weight”: if each dot corresponds to a group, the z value might be the size of the group. In the plot on the right, the size scale is reversed, and z is more naturally interpreted as a “distance” measure: distant entities are scaled to appear smaller in the plot.

15.4 Scale guides

In ggplot2, legend and axes are known collectively as guides. You might find it surprising that axes and legends are the same type of thing, but while they look very different they have the same purpose: to allow you to read observations from the plot and map them back to their original values.

Argument name Axis Legend
name Label Title
breaks Ticks & grid line Key
labels Tick label Key label

Later parts of the chapter focuses mostly on legends because they are more complicated than axes:

1. A legend can display multiple aesthetics (e.g. colour and shape), from multiple layers, and the symbol displayed in a legend varies based on the geom used in the layer.

2. Axes always appear in the same place. Legends can appear in different places, so you need some global way of controlling them.

3. Legends have considerably more details that can be tweaked: should they be displayed vertically or horizontally? How many columns? How big should the keys be?

Reflecting this additional complexity, Section 15.4 discusses guide functions, most of which relate to legends. Section 15.6 discusses how legends are split and merged across layers, Section 11.6.1 focuses on legend layout and positioning, while Section 11.7 shows you how to modify the glyphs displayed in the legend key.

15.5 Scale breaks

In the same way that the name argument to a scale function governs axis titles and legend titles, the breaks argument controls which values appear as tick marks on axes and as keys on legends.

toy <- data.frame(
const = 1,
up = 1:4,
txt = letters[1:4],
big = (1:4)*1000,
log = c(2, 5, 10, 2000)
)
toy
#>   const up txt  big  log
#> 1     1  1   a 1000    2
#> 2     1  2   b 2000    5
#> 3     1  3   c 3000   10
#> 4     1  4   d 4000 2000
axs <- ggplot(toy, aes(big, const)) +
geom_point() +
labs(x = NULL, y = NULL)

axs
axs + scale_x_continuous(breaks = c(2000, 4000))

The examples below illustrate the same ideas applied to legends:

leg <- ggplot(toy, aes(up, up, fill = big)) +
geom_tile() +
labs(x = NULL, y = NULL)

leg
leg + scale_fill_continuous(breaks = c(2000, 4000))

Another way to modify the behaviour of axes and legends is with the guide argument of the relevant scale function or—perhaps more conveniently—the guides() helper function. The guides() helper works in a similar way to the labs() helper function described in Section 8.1. Both take the name of different aesthetics (e.g., color, x, fill) as arguments and allow you to specify your own value. Where labs() provides a shorthand way to specify the name argument to one or more scales, the guides() function allows you to specify guide arguments to one or more scales. In the same way that labs(colour = "a colour scale name") specifies the name associated with the colour scale, a command such as guides(colour = guide_coloursteps()) can be used to specify its associated guide:

base <- ggplot(mpg, aes(displ, hwy, colour = cyl)) + geom_point()

base
base + scale_colour_continuous(guide = guide_coloursteps())
base + guides(colour = guide_coloursteps())

Scale guides are more complex than scale names: where the name argument (and labs() ) takes text as input, the guide argument (and guides()) require a guide object created by a guide function such as guide_colourbar() and guide_legend(). These arguments to these functions offer additional fine control over the guide.

The table below summarises the default guide functions associated with different scale types:

Scale type Default guide type
continuous scales for colour/fill aesthetics colourbar
binned scales for colour/fill aesthetics coloursteps
position scales (continuous, binned and discrete) axis
discrete scales (except position scales) legend
binned scales (except position/colour/fill scales) bins

The guide functions have numerous examples in the documentation that illustrate all of their arguments. Many of the arguments to the guide function are equivalent to theme settings (Chapter 18) like text colour, size, font etc, but only apply to a single guide. Here I’ll focus on the non-theming arguments.

15.6 Legend merging and splitting

There is always a one-to-one correspondence between position scales and axes. But the connection between non-position scales and legend is more complex: one legend may need to draw symbols from multiple layers (“merging”), or one aesthetic may need multiple legends (“splitting”).

15.6.1 Merging legends

Merging legends occurs quite frequently when using ggplot2. For example, if you’ve mapped colour to both points and lines, the keys will show both points and lines. If you’ve mapped fill colour, you get a rectangle. Note the way the legend varies in the plots below:

By default, a layer will only appear if the corresponding aesthetic is mapped to a variable with aes(). You can override whether or not a layer appears in the legend with show.legend: FALSE to prevent a layer from ever appearing in the legend; TRUE forces it to appear when it otherwise wouldn’t. Using TRUE can be useful in conjunction with the following trick to make points stand out:

ggplot(toy, aes(up, up)) +
geom_point(size = 4, colour = "grey20") +
geom_point(aes(colour = txt), size = 2)

ggplot(toy, aes(up, up)) +
geom_point(size = 4, colour = "grey20", show.legend = TRUE) +
geom_point(aes(colour = txt), size = 2) 

ggplot2 tries to use the fewest number of legends to accurately convey the aesthetics used in the plot. It does this by combining legends where the same variable is mapped to different aesthetics. The figure below shows how this works for points: if both colour and shape are mapped to the same variable, then only a single legend is necessary.

base <- ggplot(toy, aes(const, up)) +
scale_x_continuous(NULL, breaks = NULL)
base + geom_point(aes(colour = txt))
base + geom_point(aes(shape = txt))
base + geom_point(aes(shape = txt, colour = txt))

In order for legends to be merged, they must have the same name. So if you change the name of one of the scales, you’ll need to change it for all of them. One way to do this is by using labs() helper function:

base <- ggplot(toy, aes(const, up)) +
geom_point(aes(shape = txt, colour = txt)) +
scale_x_continuous(NULL, breaks = NULL)

base
base + labs(shape = "Split legend")
base + labs(shape = "Merged legend", colour = "Merged legend")

15.6.2 Splitting legends

Splitting a legend is a much less common data visualisation task. In general it is not advisable to map one aesthetic (e.g. colour) to multiple variables, and so by default ggplot2 does not allow you to “split” the colour aesthetic into multiple scales with separate legends. Nevertheless, there are exceptions to this general rule, and it is possible to override this behaviour using the ggnewscale package.43 The ggnewscale::new_scale_colour() command acts as an instruction to ggplot2 to initialise a new colour scale: scale and guide commands that appear above the new_scale_colour() command will be applied to the first colour scale, and commands that appear below are applied to the second colour scale.

To illustrate this the plot on the left uses geom_point() to display a large marker for each vehicle make in the mpg data, with a single colour scale that maps to the year. On the right, a second geom_point() layer is overlaid on the plot using small markers: this layer is associated with a different colour scale, used to indicate whether the vehicle has a 4-cylinder engine.

base <- ggplot(mpg, aes(displ, hwy)) +
geom_point(aes(colour = factor(year)), size = 5) +
scale_colour_brewer("year", type = "qual", palette = 5)

base
base +
ggnewscale::new_scale_colour() +
geom_point(aes(colour = cyl == 4), size = 1, fill = NA) +
scale_colour_manual("4 cylinder", values = c("grey60", "black"))

Additional details, including functions that apply to other scale types, are available on the package website, https://github.com/eliocamp/ggnewscale.

15.7 Exercises

1. What are the three most important arguments that apply to both axes and legends? What do they do? Compare and contrast their operation for axes vs. legends.