Visualizing Data in the Tidyverse

Data visualization is a critical part of any data science project. Once data have been imported and wrangled into place, visualizing your data can help you get a handle on what’s going on in the dataset. Similarly, once you’ve completed your analysis and are ready to present your findings, data visualizations are a highly effective way to communicate your results to others.

There are many types of plots that are helpful. We’ll discuss a few basic ones below and will include links to a few galleries where you can get a sense of the many different types of plots out there.

The goal of data visualization in data analysis is to improve understanding of the data. As mentioned in the last lesson, this could mean improving our own understanding of the data or using visualization to improve someone else’s understanding of the data. We discussed some general characteristics and basic types of plots in the last lesson, but here we will step through a number of general tips for making good plots. When generating exploratory or explanatory plots, you’ll want to ensure information being displayed is being done so accurately and in a away that best reflects the reality within the dataset. Here, we provide a number of tips to keep in mind when generating plots.

R was initially developed for statisticians, who often are interested in generating plots or figures to visualize their data. As such, a few basic plotting features were built in when R was first developed. These are all still available; however, over time, a new approach to graphing in R was developed. This new approach implemented what is known as the grammar of graphics, which allows you to develop elegant graphs flexibly in R. Making plots with this set of rules requires the R package ggplot2. This package is a core package in the tidyverse, so as along as the tidyverse has been loaded in, you’re ready to get started.

While we have focused on figures here so far, tables can be incredibly informative at a glance too. If you are looking to display summary numbers, a table can also visually display information.