Can I mimick facet_wrap() with 5 completely separate ggplots? - r

Question

I like the neatness of using facet_wrap() or facet_grid() with ggplot since the plots are all made to be the same size and are fitted row and column wise automatically.
I have a data frame and I am experimenting with various transformations and their impact on fit as measured by R2
dm1 <- lm(price ~ x, data = diamonds)
dm1R2 <- summary(dm1)$r.squared #0.78
dm2 <- lm(log(price) ~ x, data = diamonds)
dm2R2 <- summary(dm2)$r.squared # 0.9177831
dm3 <- lm(log(price) ~ x^2, data = diamonds)
dm3R2 <- summary(dm3)$r.squared # also 0.9177831. Aside, why?
ggplot(diamonds, aes(x = x, y = price)) +
geom_point() +
geom_smooth(method = "lm", se = F) +
geom_text(x = 3.5, y = 10000, label = paste0('R-Squared: ', round(dm1R2, 3)))
ggplot(diamonds, aes(x = x, y = log(price))) +
geom_point() +
geom_smooth(method = "lm", se = F) +
geom_text(x = 3, y = 9, label = paste0('R-Squared: ', round(dm2R2, 3)))
ggplot(diamonds, aes(x = x^2, y = log(price))) +
geom_point() +
geom_smooth(method = "lm", se = F) +
geom_text(x = 3, y = 20, label = paste0('R-Squared: ', round(dm3R2, 3)))
This produces 3 completely separate plots. Within Rmd file they will appear one after the other.
Is there a way to add them to a grid like when using facet_wrap?

Answer 1

You can use ggplot2's built-in faceting if you generate a "long" data frame from the regression model objects. The model object returned by lm includes the data used to fit the model, so we can extract the data and the r-squared for each model, stack them into a single data frame, and generate a faceted plot.
The disadvantage of this approach is that you lose the ability to easily set separate x-axis and y-axis titles for each panel, which is important, because the x and y values have different transformations in different panels. In an effort to mitigate that problem, I've used the model formulas as the facet labels.
Also, the reason you got the same r-squared for the models specified by log(price) ~ x and log(price) ~ x^2 is that R treats them as the same model. To tell R that you literally mean x^2 in a model formula, you need to wrap it in the I() function, making the formula log(price) ~ I(x^2). You could also do log(price) ~ poly(x, 2, raw=TRUE).
library(tidyverse)
theme_set(theme_bw(base_size=14))
# Generate a small subset of the diamonds data frame
set.seed(2)
dsub = diamonds[sample(1:nrow(diamonds), 2000), ]
dm1 <- lm(price ~ x, data = dsub)
dm2 <- lm(log(price) ~ x, data = dsub)
dm3 <- lm(log(price) ~ I(x^2), data = dsub)
# Create long data frame from the three model objects
dat = list(dm1, dm2, dm3) %>%
map_df(function(m) {
tibble(r2=summary(m)$r.squared,
form=as_label(formula(m))) %>%
cbind(m[["model"]] %>% set_names(c("price","x")))
}, .id="Model") %>%
mutate(form=factor(form, levels=unique(form)))
# Create data subset for geom_text
text.dat = dat %>% group_by(form) %>%
summarise(x = quantile(x, 1),
price = quantile(price, 0.05),
r2=r2[1])
dat %>%
ggplot(aes(x, price)) +
geom_point(alpha=0.3, colour="red") +
geom_smooth(method="lm") +
geom_text(data=text.dat, parse=TRUE,
aes(label=paste0("r^2 ==", round(r2, 2))),
hjust=1, size=3.5, colour="grey30") +
facet_wrap(~ form, scales="free")

Answer 2

ggarrange from the ggpubr package can do this:
p1 = ggplot(diamonds, aes(x = x, y = price)) +
geom_point() +
geom_smooth(method = "lm", se = F) +
geom_text(x = 3.5, y = 10000, label = paste0('R-Squared: ', round(dm1R2, 3)))
p2 = ggplot(diamonds, aes(x = x, y = log(price))) +
geom_point() +
geom_smooth(method = "lm", se = F) +
geom_text(x = 3, y = 9, label = paste0('R-Squared: ', round(dm2R2, 3)))
p3 = ggplot(diamonds, aes(x = x^2, y = log(price))) +
geom_point() +
geom_smooth(method = "lm", se = F) +
geom_text(x = 3, y = 20, label = paste0('R-Squared: ', round(dm3R2, 3)))
ggpubr::ggarrange(p1, p2, p3, ncol = 2, nrow = 2, align = "hv")
Other packages that have been suggested in the comments like cowplot and patchwork also offer good options for this.