Often you may want to create two plots side-by-side using the ggplot2 package in R. Fortunately this is easy to do with the help of the patchwork package.
#install ggplot2 and patchwork packages install.packages('ggplot2') install.packages('patchwork') #load the packages library(ggplot2) library(patchwork)
This tutorial shows several examples of how to use these packages to create side-by-side plots.
Example 1: Two Side-by-Side Plots
The following code shows how to create two side-by-side plots using the R built-in iris dataset:
#create box plot plot1 <- ggplot(iris, aes(x = Species, y = Sepal.Length)) + geom_boxplot() #create density plot plot2 <- ggplot(iris, aes(x = Sepal.Length, fill = Species)) + geom_density(alpha = 0.8) #display plots side by side plot1 + plot2
Example 2: Three Side-by-Side Plots
The following code shows how to create three side-by-side plots using the R built-in iris dataset:
#create box plot plot1 <- ggplot(iris, aes(x = Species, y = Sepal.Length)) + geom_boxplot() #create density plot plot2 <- ggplot(iris, aes(x = Sepal.Length, fill = Species)) + geom_density(alpha = 0.7) #create scatterplot plot3 <- ggplot(iris, aes(x = Sepal.Length, y = Sepal.Width)) + geom_point() #display three plots side by side plot1 + plot2 + plot3
Example 3: Two Stacked Plots
The following code shows how to create two stacked plots, one on top of the other:
#create box plot plot1 <- ggplot(iris, aes(x = Species, y = Sepal.Length)) + geom_boxplot() #create density plot plot2 <- ggplot(iris, aes(x = Sepal.Length, fill = Species)) + geom_density(alpha = 0.7) #display plots stacked on top of each other plot1 / plot2
Example 4: Add Titles, Subtitles, and Captions
The following code shows how to add titles, subtitles, and captions to the plots:
#create box plot plot1 <- ggplot(iris, aes(x = Species, y = Sepal.Length)) + geom_boxplot() + ggtitle('Boxplot') #create density plot plot2 <- ggplot(iris, aes(x = Sepal.Length, fill = Species)) + geom_density(alpha = 0.7) + ggtitle('Density Plot') #display plots side by side with title, subtitle, and captions patchwork <- plot1 + plot2 patchwork + plot_annotation( title = 'This is a title', subtitle = 'This is a subtitle that describes more information about the plots', caption = 'This is a caption' )
You can find more R tutorials here.
