Why R doesn't read my columns as numeric?

Question

I have a data frame grouped by hours and days, with three attributes: calories, steps and intensity. All of them are in int type format, I've already checked a lot of times with glimpse() . I want to build a plot with this data frame, but the plot doesn't change if I change the attributes. I added a new fill based on intensity and I found the problem; ggplot2 counts the number of rows and for this the plot never change.

Here a dput() of the data frame, only tidyverse package is necessary :

structure(list(id = c(7007744171, 2347167796, 8053475328, 8877689391, 
8877689391, 7007744171, 8053475328, 7086361926, 8053475328, 8877689391, 
7007744171, 8053475328, 8053475328, 8253242879, 7086361926, 8053475328, 
8877689391, 2022484408, 8053475328, 8053475328), hour = c(8, 
8, 19, 17, 18, 8, 19, 17, 19, 16, 8, 19, 21, 10, 13, 14, 12, 
9, 19, 14), day = structure(c(1L, 6L, 4L, 3L, 3L, 3L, 6L, 3L, 
3L, 4L, 4L, 2L, 7L, 7L, 2L, 4L, 2L, 1L, 5L, 7L), .Label = c("Monday", 
"Tuesday", "Wednesday", "Thursday", "Friday", "Saturday", "Sunday"
), class = "factor"), calories = c(353L, 317L, 413L, 505L, 497L, 
336L, 379L, 512L, 357L, 397L, 293L, 335L, 334L, 251L, 279L, 330L, 
353L, 338L, 323L, 321L), steps = c(4904L, 4752L, 4706L, 4606L, 
4328L, 4247L, 4127L, 4089L, 3794L, 3705L, 3660L, 3553L, 3451L, 
3440L, 3401L, 3396L, 3387L, 3322L, 3302L, 3280L), intensity = c(138L, 
117L, 121L, 107L, 107L, 123L, 101L, 143L, 91L, 72L, 105L, 87L, 
87L, 71L, 81L, 79L, 82L, 99L, 83L, 86L), status = structure(c(2L, 
2L, 3L, 3L, 3L, 2L, 3L, 3L, 3L, 3L, 2L, 3L, 3L, 2L, 3L, 3L, 3L, 
3L, 3L, 3L), .Label = c("Sedentary User", "Light User", "Heavy User"
), class = "factor")), row.names = c(NA, 20L), class = "data.frame")

Here is the code of the plot:

ggplot(data=week_hourly,
   mapping=aes(x=hour, y=intensity, fill = intensity, alpha=hour)) +
  geom_col() + 
  coord_flip() +  
  scale_fill_gradient(low = "#8a2380", high = "#f27121") + 
  scale_alpha(range=c(0.7,1), guide="none") + 
  labs(title="Intensity per Hour", 
  subtitle="Through the week", x="Hour", y= "Intensity") +
  theme(legend.position = "top") +
  scale_x_continuous(breaks=seq(0,23,4)) + 
  facet_grid(status~day)

And here is the result:

As you can see the fill doesn't count the unique value of intensity, and in the axis X the scale is until 400 when the max value on intensity is of 165. I've already tried convert the columns with as.integer and as.numeric and other methods, but nothing helps.

Answer 1

@MrFlick diagnosed the problem correctly:

The problem looks like you have not summarized your data before plotting and you have multiple values per day/hour and values are being stacked.

One sensible way to summarize your data (ie, collapse all the intensity measurements for a particular status/day/hour combination to a single value) would be

library(tidyverse)
wh_sum <- week_hourly %>% 
          group_by(status, day, hour) %>% 
          summarise(across(intensity, mean))

You could probably also do this on the fly with stat_summary() :

ggplot(data=week_hourly,
   mapping=aes(x=hour, y=intensity, fill = intensity, alpha=hour)) +
  stat_summary(fun.y = mean, geom = "col") + ...