R-Programming - ggplot2 - boxplot issues (varwidth & position_dodge / stat_summary & position_dodge) - r

Question

I am currently using ggplot2 to display some feature distributions with boxplots.
I can produce some simple boxplots, changing color, form, etc. but I cannot achieve the ones that combine several options.
1°)
My purpose is to display side by side boxplots for men and for women, which can be done with position = position_dodge(width=0.9).
I want that the width of the boxplot be proportional to the size of the sample, which can be done with var_width=TRUE.
First problem: when I put the two options together, it does not work and I get the following message:
position_dodge requires non-overlapping x intervals
Boxplot when using var_width=TRUE and position_dodge together:
I have tried to change the size of the plot, but it did not help. If I skip var_width=TRUE, then the boxplots are correctly dodged.
Is there a way out to this or is this a limit of ggplot2?
2°)
Besides, I want to display the size of each sample building the boxplots.
I can get the calculation with stat_summary(fun.data = give.n, but unfortunately, I have not found a way to avoid that the numbers overlap over each other when the boxplots are of similar positions.
I tried to use hjust & vjust to change the numbers’ positions, but they seem to share the same origin, so that does not help.
Overlapping numbers produced by stats_summary when boxplots are dodged:
As there are not labels, I could not use geom_text or I do not find a way how to get the stat passed to the geom_text.
So the second problem is: how can I nicely display each number on its own boxplot?
Here is my code:
`library(ggplot2)
# function to get the median of my sample
give.n <- function(x){
return(c(y = median(x), label = length(x)))
}
plot_boxes <- function(mydf, mycolumn1, mycolumn2) {
mylegendx <- deparse(substitute(mycolumn1))
mylegendy <- deparse(substitute(mycolumn2))
g2 <- ggplot(mydf, aes(x=as.factor(mycolumn1), y=mycolumn2, color=Gender,
fill=Gender)) +
geom_boxplot( data=mydf, aes(x=as.factor(mycolumn1), y=mycolumn2,
color=Gender), position=position_dodge(width=0.9), alpha=0.3) +
stat_summary(fun.data = give.n, geom = "text", size = 3, vjust=1) +
theme(axis.text.x = element_text(angle = 45, hjust = 1)) +
scale_x_discrete(name = mylegendx ) +
labs(title=paste("Boxplot ", substring(mylegendy, 11), " by ",
substring(mylegendx, 11)) , x = mylegendx, y = mylegendy)
print(g2)
}
#setwd("~/data")
filename <- "df_stackoverflow.csv"
df_client <- read.csv(file=filename, header=TRUE, sep=";", dec=".")
plot_boxes(df_client, df_client$Client.Class, df_client$nbyears_client)`
And the data looks like this (small sample from the dataset - 20,000 lines):
Client.Id;Client.Status;Client.Class;Gender;nbyears_client
3;Active;Middle Class;Male;1.38
4;Active;Middle Class;Male;0.9
5;Active;Retiree;Female;0.21
6;Active;Middle Class;Male;0.9
7;Active;Middle Class;Male;3.55
8;Active;Subprime;Male;1.16
9;Active;Middle Class;Male;1.21
10;Active;Part-time;Male;3.38
17;Active;Middle Class;Male;1.83
19;Active;Subprime;Female;5.81
20;Active;Farming;Male;8.99
21;Active;Subprime;Female;6.49
22;Active;Middle Class;Male;1.54
23;Active;Middle Class;Female;2.74
24;Active;Subprime;Male;0.46
25;Active;Executive;Female;0.49
26;Active;Middle Class;Female;3.55
27;Active;Middle Class;Male;3.83
29;Active;Subprime;Female;2.66
30;Active;Middle Class;Male;2.72
31;Active;Middle Class;Female;4.88
32;Active;Subprime;Male;1.46
34;Active;Middle Class;Female;7.16
41;Active;Middle Class;Male;0.65
44;Active;Middle Class;Male;2
45;Active;Subprime;Male;1.13