How to plot a variable over time with time as rownames - r

Question

I am trying to plot a time series in ggplot2. Assume I am using the following data structure (2500 x 20 matrix):
set.seed(21)
n <- 2500
x <- matrix(replicate(20,cumsum(sample(c(-1, 1), n, TRUE))),nrow = 2500,ncol=20)
aa <- x
rnames <- seq(as.Date("2010-01-01"), length=dim(aa)[1], by="1 month") - 1
rownames(aa) <- format(as.POSIXlt(rnames, format = "%Y-%m-%d"), format = "%d.%m.%Y")
colnames(aa) <- paste0("aa",1:k)
library("ggplot2")
library("reshape2")
library("scales")
aa <- melt(aa, id.vars = rownames(aa))
names(aa) <- c("time","id","value")
Now the following command to plot the time series produces a weird looking x axis:
ggplot(aa, aes(x=time,y=value,colour=id,group=id)) +
geom_line()
What I found out is that I can change the format to date:
aa$time <- as.Date(aa$time, "%d.%m.%Y")
ggplot(aa, aes(x=time,y=value,colour=id,group=id)) +
geom_line()
This looks better, but still not a good graph. My question is especially how to control the formatting of the x axis.
Does it have to be in Date format? How can I control the amount of breaks (i.e. years) shown in either case? It seems to be mandatory if Date is not used; otherwise ggplot2 uses some kind of useful default for the breaks I believe.
For example the following command does not work:
aa$time <- as.Date(aa$time, "%d.%m.%Y")
ggplot(aa, aes(x=time,y=value,colour=id,group=id)) +
geom_line() +
scale_x_continuous(breaks=pretty_breaks(n=10))
Also if you got any hints how to improve the overall look of the graph feel free to add (e.g. the lines look a bit inprecise imho).

Answer 1

You can format dates with scale_x_date as #Gopala mentioned. Here's an example using a shortened version of your data for illustration.
library(dplyr)
# Dates need to be in date format
aa$time <- as.Date(aa$time, "%d.%m.%Y")
# Shorten data to speed rendering
aa = aa %>% group_by(id) %>% slice(1:200)
In the code below, we get date breaks every six months with date_breaks="6 months". That's probably more breaks than you want in this case and is just for illustration. If you want to determine which months get the breaks (e.g., Jan/July, Feb/Aug, etc.) then you also need to use coord_cartesian and set the start date with xlim and expand=FALSE so that ggplot won't pad the start date. But when you set expand=FALSE you also don't get any padding on the y-axis, so you need to add the padding manually with scale_y_continuous (I'd prefer to be able to set expand separately for the x and y axes, but AFAIK it's not possible). Because the breaks are packed tightly, we use a theme statement to rotate the labels by 90 degrees.
ggplot(aa, aes(x=time,y=value,colour=id,group=id)) +
geom_line(show.legend=FALSE) +
scale_y_continuous(limits=c(min(aa$value) - 2, max(aa$value) + 1)) +
scale_x_date(date_breaks="6 months",
labels=function(d) format(d, "%b %Y")) +
coord_cartesian(xlim=c(as.Date("2009-07-01"), max(aa$time) + 182),
expand=FALSE) +
theme_bw() +
theme(axis.text.x=element_text(angle=-90, vjust=0.5))