Note Regarding Archiving

This package no longer functions as expected with recent changes to ggplot2. As an alternative, please see the ggh4x package, which provides a simpler solution for generating this type of plot via functions like facet_nested. For example, the following code will generate a plot (i.e., p3) very similar to the p2 example shown below:

library("ggh4x")

p3 <- p1 + facet_nested(~ am + vs + gear, scales = TRUE, space = TRUE)
ggsave("p3.png", width = 20, height = 5)

ggNestedBarChart

An easier way to create nested, grouped, heirarchical bar charts with ggplot2

Screenshot

Installation

devtools::install_github("davedgd/ggNestedBarChart")

Usage

library(ggNestedBarChart)
library(stringr)

# set up data
data(mtcars)
mtcars <- mtcars %>%
  mutate(car = rownames(mtcars),
         vs = recode(vs, "0" = "V-Shaped", "1" = "Straight"),
         am = recode(am, "0" = "Automatic", "1" = "Manual"),
         gear = paste(gear, "Gears"),
         carb = paste(carb, "Carbs"),
         brand = str_split(rownames(mtcars), " ") %>% map_chr(., 1))

# create base ggplot2 bar chart with theme tweaks
p1 <- ggplot(mtcars, aes(x = brand, fill = carb)) +
  geom_bar() +
  geom_text(aes(label = ..count..), stat = "count", position = position_stack(0.5), color = "white", fontface = "bold") +
  facet_wrap(vars(am, vs, gear), strip.position = "top", scales = "free_x", nrow = 1) +
  theme_bw(base_size = 15) +
  theme(panel.spacing = unit(0, "lines"),
        strip.background = element_rect(color = "black", size = 0.1, fill = "grey92"),
        strip.placement = "outside",
        axis.text.x = element_text(angle = 90, hjust = 1, vjust = 0.3),
        panel.grid.major = element_blank(),
        panel.grid.minor = element_line(colour = "grey"),
        panel.border = element_rect(color = "black", fill = NA, size = 0.1),
        panel.background = element_rect(fill = "white"))

# show/save base ggplot2 bar chart
p1
ggsave("p1.png", width = 20, height = 5)

# show/save ggNestedBarChart
(p2 <- ggNestedBarChart(p1))
ggsave("p2.png", width = 20, height = 5)