Add hline with population median for each facet

Question

I'd like to plot a horizontal facet-wide line with the population median of that facet.

I tried the approach without creating a dummy summary table with the following code:

require(ggplot2)

dt = data.frame(gr = rep(1:2, each = 500),
            id = rep(1:5, 2, each = 100), 
            y = c(rnorm(500, mean = 0, sd = 1), rnorm(500, mean = 1, sd = 2)))


ggplot(dt, aes(x = as.factor(id), y = y)) +
  geom_boxplot() +
  facet_wrap(~ gr) +
  geom_hline(aes(yintercept = median(y), group = gr), colour = 'red')

However, the line is drawn for the median of the entire dataset instead of the median separately for each facet:

In the past, a solution has been suggested to use

  geom_line(stat = "hline", yintercept = "median")

but it's been discontinued (produces the error "No stat called StatHline").

Another solution suggested

 geom_errorbar(aes(ymax=..y.., ymin=..y.., y = mean))

but it generates

Error in data.frame(y = function (x, ...)  : 
arguments imply differing number of rows: 0, 1000

Finally, there's a way to plot the median by creating a dummy table with the desired stats but I'd like to avoid it.

Answer 1

You could create an extra column in dt for median per facet.

library(dplyr) # With dplyr for example
dt <- dt %>% group_by(gr) %>%
  mutate(med = median(y))

# Rerun ggplot line with yintercept = med
ggplot(dt, aes(x = as.factor(id), y = y)) +
  geom_boxplot() +
  facet_wrap(~ gr) +
  geom_hline(aes(yintercept = med, group = gr), colour = 'red')

Answer 2

If you don't want to add a new column with the computed median, you can add a geom_smooth using a quantile regression :

library(ggplot2)
library(quantreg)

set.seed(1234)

dt <- data.frame(gr = rep(1:2, each = 500),
                id = rep(1:5, 2, each = 100), 
                y = c(rnorm(500, mean = 0, sd = 1),
                      rnorm(500, mean = 1, sd = 2)))

ggplot(dt, aes(y = y)) +
  geom_boxplot(aes(x = as.factor(id))) +
  geom_smooth(aes(x = id), method = "rq", formula = y ~ 1, se = FALSE) +
  facet_wrap(~ gr)