Summarising data before plotting with geom_tile() renders different results - r

Question

I have noticed that when plotting with ggplot2's geom_tile(), summarising the data before plotting renders a completely different result than when it is not pre-summarised. I don't understand why.
For a dataframe with three columns, year (character), state (character) and profit (numeric), consider the following examples:
# Plot straight away
data %>%
ggplot(aes(x=year, y=state)) + geom_tile(aes(fill=profit))
# Summarise before plotting
data %>% group_by(year, state) %>% summarize(profit_mean = mean(profit)) %>%
ungroup() %>%
ggplot(aes(x=year, y=state)) + geom_tile(aes(fill=profit_mean))
These two examples render two different tile plots - the values are quite different. I thought that these two methods of plotting would be analogous and that ggplot2 would take a mean automatically - is that not so?
I tried reproducing this error on a smaller subset of data, but it didn't appear. What could be going on here?

Answer 1

OP, this was a very interesting question.
First, let's get this out of the way. It is clear what plotting the summary of your data is plotting just that: the summary. You are summarizing via mean, so what is plotted equals the mean of the values for each tile.
The actual question here is: If you have a dataset containing more than one value per tile, what is the result of plotting the "non-summarized" dataset?
User #akrun is correct: the default stat used for geom_tile is stat="identity", but it might not be clear what that exactly means. It says it "leaves the data unchanged"... but that's not clear what that means here.
Illustrative Example Dataset
For purposes of demonstration, I'll create an illustrative dataset, which will answer the question very clearly. I'm creating two individual datasets df1 and df2, which each contain 4 "tiles" of data. The difference between these is that the values themselves for the tiles are different. I've include text labels on each tile for more clarity.
library(ggplot2)
library(cowplot)
df1 <- data.frame(
x=rep(paste("Test",1:2), 2),
y=rep(c("A", "B"), each=2),
value=c(5,15,20,25)
)
df2 <- data.frame(
x=rep(paste("Test",1:2), 2),
y=rep(c("A", "B"), each=2),
value=c(10,5,25,15)
)
tile1 <- ggplot(df1, aes(x,y, fill=value, label=value)) +
geom_tile() + geom_text() + labs(title="df1")
tile2 <- ggplot(df2, aes(x,y, fill=value, label=value)) +
geom_tile() + geom_text() + labs(title="df2")
plot_grid(tile1, tile2)
Plotting the Combined Data Frame
Each of the data frames df1 and df2 contain only one value per tile, so in order to see how that changes when we have more than one value per tile, we need to combine them into one so that each tile will contain 2 values. In this example, we are going to combine them in two ways: first df1 then df2, and the other way is df2 first, then df1.
df12 <- rbind(df1, df2)
df21 <- rbind(df2, df1)
Now, if we plot each of those as before and compare, the reason for the discrepancy the OP posted should be quite obvious. I'm including the value for each tile for each originating dataset to make things super-clear.
tile12 <- ggplot(df12, aes(x,y, fill=value, label=value)) +
geom_tile() + labs(title="df1, then df2") +
geom_text(data=df1, aes(label=paste("df1:",value)), nudge_y=0.1) +
geom_text(data=df2, aes(label=paste("df2:",value)), nudge_y=-0.1)
tile21 <- ggplot(df21, aes(x,y, fill=value, label=value)) +
geom_tile() + labs(title="df2, then df1") +
geom_text(data=df1, aes(label=paste("df1:",value)), nudge_y=0.1) +
geom_text(data=df2, aes(label=paste("df2:",value)), nudge_y=-0.1)
plot_grid(tile12, tile21)
Note that the legend colorbar value does not change, so it's not doing an addition. Plus, since we know it's stat="identity", we know this should not be the case. When we use the dataset that contains first observations from df1, then observations from df2, the value plotted is the one from df2. When we use the dataset that contains observations first from df2, then from df1, the value plotted is the one from df1.
Given this piece of information, it can be clear that the value shown in geom_tile() when using stat="identity" (default argument) corresponds to the last observation for that particular tile represented in the data frame.
So, that's the reason why your plot looks odd OP. You can either summarize beforehand as you have done, or use stat_summary(geom="tile"... to do the transformation in one go within ggplot.