violin_plot() with continuous axis for grouping variable? - r

Question

The grouping variable for creating a geom_violin() plot in ggplot2 is expected to be discrete for obvious reasons. However my discrete values are numbers, and I would like to show them on a continuous scale so that I can overlay a continuous function of those numbers on top of the violins. Toy example:
library(tidyverse)
df <- tibble(x = sample(c(1,2,5), size = 1000, replace = T),
y = rnorm(1000, mean = x))
ggplot(df) + geom_violin(aes(x=factor(x), y=y))
This works as you'd imagine: violins with their x axis values (equally spaced) labelled 1, 2, and 5, with their means at y=1,2,5 respectively. I want to overlay a continuous function such as y=x, passing through the means. Is that possible? Adding + scale_x_continuous() predictably gives Error: Discrete value supplied to continuous scale. A solution would presumably spread the violins horizontally by the numeric x values, i.e. three times the spacing between 2 and 5 as between 1 and 2, but that is not the only thing I'm trying to achieve - overlaying a continuous function is the key issue.
If this isn't possible, alternative visualisation suggestions are welcome. I know I could replace violins with a simple scatter plot to give a rough sense of density as a function of y for a given x.

Answer 1

The functionality to plot violin plots on a continuous scale is directly built into ggplot.
The key is to keep the original continuous variable (instead of transforming it into a factor variable) and specify how to group it within the aesthetic mapping of the geom_violin() object. The width of the groups can be modified with the cut_width argument, depending on the data at hand.
library(tidyverse)
df <- tibble(x = sample(c(1,2,5), size = 1000, replace = T),
y = rnorm(1000, mean = x))
ggplot(df, aes(x=x, y=y)) +
geom_violin(aes(group = cut_width(x, 1)), scale = "width") +
geom_smooth(method = 'lm')
By using this approach, all geoms for continuous data and their varying functionalities can be combined with the violin plots, e.g. we could easily replace the line with a loess curve and add a scatter plot of the points.
ggplot(df, aes(x=x, y=y)) +
geom_violin(aes(group = cut_width(x, 1)), scale = "width") +
geom_smooth(method = 'loess') +
geom_point()
More examples can be found in the ggplot helpfile for violin plots.

Answer 2

Try this. As you already guessed, spreading the violins by numeric values is the key to the solution. To this end I expand the df to include all x values in the interval min(x) to max(x) and use scale_x_discrete(drop = FALSE) so that all values are displayed.
Note: Thanks #ChrisW for the more general example of my approach.
library(tidyverse)
set.seed(42)
df <- tibble(x = sample(c(1,2,5), size = 1000, replace = T), y = rnorm(1000, mean = x^2))
# y = x^2
# add missing x values
x.range <- seq(from=min(df$x), to=max(df$x))
df <- df %>% right_join(tibble(x = x.range))
#> Joining, by = "x"
# Whatever the desired continuous function is:
df.fit <- tibble(x = x.range, y=x^2) %>%
mutate(x = factor(x))
ggplot() +
geom_violin(data=df, aes(x = factor(x, levels = 1:5), y=y)) +
geom_line(data=df.fit, aes(x, y, group=1), color = "red") +
scale_x_discrete(drop = FALSE)
#> Warning: Removed 2 rows containing non-finite values (stat_ydensity).
Created on 2020-06-11 by the reprex package (v0.3.0)