Alternative to geom_linerange and facets

Question

I'd like to achieve a graph something like this using ggplot:

The closest I can get is:

ggplot(dat, aes(x = Date, color = Rain)) + 
geom_linerange(aes(ymin = 0, ymax = 1)) +
facet_wrap(~Station, ncol = 1)

which gives:

I can sort out all the formatting details. My question is: can I achieve this with Station on the y-axis instead of as a facet variable, as in the original?

I don't think geom_linerange is the right way to go for this. I tried putting Station as the y aesthetic but that didn't work. Is there another geom I could use instead?

Answer 1

As I commented above, I think geom_raster would be your best option here. Let's make up some data to see how it works.

library(ggplot)
dat <- data.frame(Date    = c(1:5, 1:5), 
                  Station = c(rep("A", 5), rep("B", 5)), 
                  Rain    = c(0,0,1,1,0, NA,1,0,1,1))

A simple plot would be,

ggplot(dat, aes(Date, Station)) + 
  geom_raster(aes(fill = factor(Rain)))

Now, the advantage of using geom_raster over geom_tile is that you can control the justification of the tile using hjust and vjust . Values for this go from 0 to 1, the default is 0.5, let's try replacing those for zeroes

ggplot(dat, aes(Date, Station)) + 
  geom_raster(aes(fill = factor(Rain)),
              hjust = 0,
              vjust = 0)

I think the default option works fine, I hope this helps. Cheers!

Answer 2

How about

ggplot(dat, aes(x = Date, color = Rain)) + 
    geom_linerange(aes(ymin = 0, ymax = 1)) +
    facet_wrap(Station ~ .)

Use facet_wrap instead of facet_grid puts the labels on the axis instead of cluttering up the whole grid by putting the labels on top of individual charts.