ggplot/ally boxplots using for loop

Question

I am trying to plot ggplot matrix, the box plot version works just fine but when I try to do the same with ggplot I fail miserably

boxplot version:

par(mfrow=c(3, 3))
for (scale in c("POMS",
                "POMS_post",
                "DERS",
                "DERS_post",
                "REAPPRAISAL",
                "REAPPRAISAL_POST",
                "NEGATIV",
                "NEGATIVE_POST")) {
        boxplot(kata1[, scale] ~ Skupina, data=kata1, ylab=scale)
}

result of box plot version:

ggplot version:

# Testing
for (scale in c("POMS",
                "POMS_post",
                "DERS",
                "DERS_post",
                "REAPPRAISAL",
                "REAPPRAISAL_POST",
                "NEGATIV",
                "NEGATIVE_POST")) {
        ggally_box(kata1, aes(Skupina, kata1[, scale])) # This does not work...
}

I think it should not be that difficult but I am stuck.

Thank you for help!

And you might have to use `print` explicitly within the loop. — drmariod, Nov 09 '15 at 08:09
Thanks, aes_string with print statement work nicely, however it prints out each of the plots separately (one plot at time) instead of plotting it into a matrix. Any ideas as to why? — gofraidh, Nov 09 '15 at 11:46
Because ggplot doesn't play nice with setting par(mfrow). You could look into the gridExtra-package and do grid.arrange. You could also consider melting your data, and using facet_wrap. — Heroka, Nov 09 '15 at 12:24

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 10 '15 at 16:11

After a bit of playing this worked out, though it is kind of painful approach to add all those plots[[i]]. Thank you for help.

plots = NULL
for (scale in c("POMS",
                "POMS_post",
                "DERS",
                "DERS_post",
                "REAPPRAISAL",
                "REAPPRAISAL_POST",
                "NEGATIV",
                "NEGATIVE_POST")) {
        plots[[scale]] = ggally_box(kata1, aes_string("Skupina", scale, color = "Skupina"), 
                                    outlier.colour = "red",
                                    outlier.shape = 13)
        }

grid.arrange(plots[[1]],plots[[2]],
             plots[[3]],plots[[4]],
             plots[[5]],plots[[6]],
             plots[[7]],plots[[8]], ncol = 2)

ggplot/ally boxplots using for loop

1 Answers1