Time Series Plots Using ggplot2

Of course, the ggplot2 can also visualize time series. This section introduces the relevant ggplot2 syntax.

Plot multiple time series data

Here, we'll plot the variables psavert and uempmed by dates. You should first reshape the data using the tidyr package: - Collapse psavert and uempmed values in the same column (new column). R function: gather()[tidyr] - Create a grouping variable that with levels = psavert and uempmed

library(tidyr)
library(dplyr)
df <- economics %>%
  select(date, psavert, uempmed) %>%
  gather(key = "variable", value = "value", -date)
head(df, 3)

## # A tibble: 3 x 3
##         date variable value
##            
## 1 1967-07-01  psavert  12.5
## 2 1967-08-01  psavert  12.5
## 3 1967-09-01  psavert  11.7

# Multiple line plot
ggplot(df, aes(x = date, y = value)) + 
  geom_line(aes(color = variable), size = 1) +
  scale_color_manual(values = c("#00AFBB", "#E7B800")) +
  theme_minimal()

# Area plot
ggplot(df, aes(x = date, y = value)) + 
  geom_area(aes(color = variable, fill = variable), 
            alpha = 0.5, position = position_dodge(0.8)) +
  scale_color_manual(values = c("#00AFBB", "#E7B800")) +
  scale_fill_manual(values = c("#00AFBB", "#E7B800"))