Choropleth world map - r

Question

I have read so many threads and articles and I keep getting errors. I am trying to make a choropleth? map of the world using data I have from the global terrorism database. I want to color countries on a factor of nkills or just the number of attacks in that country.. I don't care at this point. Because there are so many countries with data, it is unreasonable to make any plots to show this data.
Help is strongly appreciated and if I did not ask this correctly I sincerely apologize, I am learning the rules of this website as I go.
my code (so far..)
library(maps)
library(ggplot2)
map("world")
world<- map_data("world")
gtd<- data.frame(gtd)
names(gtd)<- tolower(names(gtd))
gtd$country_txt<- tolower(rownames(gtd))
demo<- merge(world, gts, sort=FALSE, by="country_txt")
In the gtd data frame, the name for the countries column is "country_txt" so I thought I would use that but I get error in fix.by(by.x, x) : 'by' must specify a uniquely valid column
If that were to work, I would plot as I have seen on a few websites..
I have honestly been working on this for so long and I have read so many codes/other similar questions/websites/r handbooks etc.. I will accept that I am incompetent when it comes to R gladly for some help.

Answer 1

Something like this? This is a solution using rgdal and ggplot. I long ago gave up on using base R for this type of thing.
library(rgdal) # for readOGR(...)
library(RColorBrewer) # for brewer.pal(...)
library(ggplot2)
setwd(" < directory with all files >")
gtd <- read.csv("globalterrorismdb_1213dist.csv")
gtd.recent <- gtd[gtd$iyear>2009,]
gtd.recent <- aggregate(nkill~country_txt,gtd.recent,sum)
world <- readOGR(dsn=".",
layer="world_country_admin_boundary_shapefile_with_fips_codes")
countries <- world#data
countries <- cbind(id=rownames(countries),countries)
countries <- merge(countries,gtd.recent,
by.x="CNTRY_NAME", by.y="country_txt", all.x=T)
map.df <- fortify(world)
map.df <- merge(map.df,countries, by="id")
ggplot(map.df, aes(x=long,y=lat,group=group)) +
geom_polygon(aes(fill=nkill))+
geom_path(colour="grey50")+
scale_fill_gradientn(name="Deaths",
colours=rev(brewer.pal(9,"Spectral")),
na.value="white")+
coord_fixed()+labs(x="",y="")
There are several versions of the Global Terrorism Database. I used the full dataset available here, and then subsetted for year > 2009. So this map shows total deaths due to terrorism, by country, from 2010-01-01 to 2013-01-01 (the last data available from this source). The files are available as MS Excel download, which I converted to csv for import into R.
The world map is available as a shapefile from the GeoCommons website.
The tricky part of making choropleth maps is associating your data with the correct polygons (countries). This is generally a four step process:
Find a field in the shapefile attributes table that maps (no pun intended) to a corresponding field in your data. In this case, it appears that the field "CNTRY_NAME" in the shapefile maps to the field "country_txt" in gtd database.
Create an association between ploygon IDs (stored in the row names of the attribute table), and the CNTRY_NAME field.
Merge the result with your data using CNTRY_NAME and country_txt.
Merge the result of that with the data frame created using the fortify(map) - this associates ploygons with deaths (nkill).

Answer 2

Building on the nice work by #jlhoward. You could instead use rworldmap that already has a world map in R and has functions to aid joining data to the map. The default map is deliberately low resolution to create a 'cleaner' look. The map can be customised (see rworldmap documentation) but here is a start :
library(rworldmap)
#3 lines from #jlhoward
gtd <- read.csv("globalterrorismdb_1213dist.csv")
gtd.recent <- gtd[gtd$iyear>2009,]
gtd.recent <- aggregate(nkill~country_txt,gtd.recent,sum)
#join data to a map
gtdMap <- joinCountryData2Map( gtd.recent,
nameJoinColumn="country_txt",
joinCode="NAME" )
mapDevice('x11') #create a world shaped window
#plot the map
mapCountryData( gtdMap,
nameColumnToPlot='nkill',
catMethod='fixedWidth',
numCats=100 )
Following a comment from #hk47, you can also add the points to the map sized by the number of casualties.
deaths <- subset(x=gtd, nkill >0)
mapBubbles(deaths,
nameX='longitude',
nameY='latitude',
nameZSize='nkill',
nameZColour='black',
fill=FALSE,
addLegend=FALSE,
add=TRUE)