How to create an Orbit Chart in R? (Plotly/ggplot2) - r

Question

I have spent time researching with no direction on how to create an orbit chart
I would ideally like to be able to create interactive versions (such as Plotly) but a ggplot2 would suffice as well.
Any suggestions are much appreciated!

Answer 1

For a weekly vis contest some time ago, I created some charts like this. I think the commonly accepted term now is "connected scatterplot".
Here is the skeleton plotly code I used.
plot_ly(
df,
x = x_var,
y = y_var,
group = group_var,
mode = "markers") %>%
add_trace(
x = x_var,
y = y_var,
xaxis = list(title = ""),
yaxis = list(title = ""),
group = group_var,
line = list(shape = "spline"),
showlegend = FALSE,
hoverinfo = "none")
You can look at the github repo for my submission which includes the code for both ggplot and plotly to produce connected scatterplots.

Answer 2

Using ggplot2:
geom_path() connects the observations in the order in which they appear in the data. geom_line() connects them in order of the variable on the x axis.
Taken from the ggplot manual page: http://docs.ggplot2.org/current/geom_path.html
You may also try out geom_curve and geom_segment if you want more control.

Answer 3

Thanks to #Bishop, I was able to formulate something really close to my ideal orbit chat. I included some chart annotations, for the start and end date and a label for which direction is the optimal solution.
max_date <- final_data_grp[which.max(final_data_grp$week_num), ]
min_date <- final_data_grp[which.min(final_data_grp$week_num), ]
end <- list(
x = max_date$AreaWOH,
y = max_date$SLevel,
text = paste('End', max_date$MondayDate),
xref = "x",
yref = "y"
)
start <- list(
x = min_date$AreaWOH,
y = min_date$SLevel,
text = paste('Start', min_date$MondayDate),
xref = "x",
yref = "y"
)
best_label = list(
x = min(final_data_grp$AreaWOH),
y = max(final_data_grp$SLevel),
text = 'Best Scenario',
showarrow = FALSE,
bordercolor='#c7c7c7',
borderwidth=2,
borderpad=4,
bgcolor='#ff7f0e',
opacity=.7
)
plot_ly(
final_data_grp,
x = AreaWOH,
y = SLevel,
group = MondayDate,
showlegend = FALSE,
marker = list(size = 8,
color = 'black',
opacity = .6)) %>%
add_trace(
x = AreaWOH,
y = SLevel,
line = list(shape = "spline"),
hoverinfo = "none",
showlegend = FALSE) %>%
layout(annotations = list(start, end, best_label))