plot panel visualization using ggplot2 in R shiny

Question

I am implementing a R shiny with a plot panel implemented by library(ggplot2). If there are 12 plots, the layout looks great. Please check below.

12-plot layout

However, if I increase the plot number to 70, then each plot looks being compressed (pls see below). Is that possible I can keep the size of each plot fixed? Thank you so much!

enter image description here

Answer 1

Is there another way to approach this? For instance, can you group your data by two categorical variables and use on for colouring and the other for facetting? In that way, you may be able to reduce the number of facets, and stick with the larger facet size, while still conveying all relevant information? 70 facet plots is a lot!

Answer 2

Is this more of a QC thing? For QC, I tend to break it into groups by condition as Paul was suggesting. The reason is that within a condition, things should be really similar. Outside a condition, all bets are off. When I do this for genomics data, I tend to use “pairs” customized to my liking.

What don't you like about the 70 sample display? Simply the change in aspect ratio? IMO, these are the things I don't like about ggplot. You can make these plots using base R and then place them on a page manually using par or layout. For that matter, you can do the same with ggplot and use ggarrange or a different manual layout function to place the plots. All wrapped in a for or apply of course.

The other things I like to do when I have a LOT of QCs to look through is create a movie. I can use the forward/back buttons and go through a lot quickly. I like the idea of having this in a dashboard, nice one!

Answer 3

you could also try coord_fixed(ratio= ) , not sure if that will work with faceting or not

Answer 4

Finally, I have made a movie-like visualization for those 70 plots using the plot_ly function in R package "plotly".