Line at the top of a ridgeline density plot is cut off

Question

Why is the top of the plot cut off and how do I fix this? I've increased the margins and it made no difference.

See the curve for year 1854, at the very top of the left hump. It appears the line is thinner at the top of the hump. For me, changing the size to 0.8 does not help.

This is the code needed to produce this example:

library(tidyverse)
library(ggridges)

t2 <-   structure(list(Date = c("1853-01", "1853-02", "1853-03", "1853-04", 
                                "1853-05", "1853-06", "1853-07", "1853-08", "1853-09", "1853-10", 
                                "1853-11", "1853-12", "1854-01", "1854-02", "1854-03", "1854-04", 
                                "1854-05", "1854-06", "1854-07", "1854-08", "1854-09", "1854-10", 
                                "1854-11", "1854-12"), t = c(-5.6, -5.3, -1.5, 4.9, 9.8, 17.9, 
                                                             18.5, 19.9, 14.8, 6.2, 3.1, -4.3, -5.9, -7, -1.3, 4.1, 10, 16.8, 
                                                             22, 20, 16.1, 10.1, 1.8, -5.6), year = c("1853", "1853", "1853", 
                                                                                                      "1853", "1853", "1853", "1853", "1853", "1853", "1853", "1853", 
                                                                                                      "1853", "1854", "1854", "1854", "1854", "1854", "1854", "1854", 
                                                                                                      "1854", "1854", "1854", "1854", "1854")), row.names = c(NA, -24L
                                                                                                      ), class = c("tbl_df", "tbl", "data.frame"), .Names = c("Date", 
                                                                                                                                                              "t", "year"))

# Density plot -----------------------------------------------
jj <- ggplot(t2, aes(x = t, y = year)) +
  stat_density_ridges(
    geom = "density_ridges_gradient",
    quantile_lines = TRUE,
    size = 1,
    quantiles = 2) +
  theme_ridges() +
  theme(
    plot.margin = margin(t = 1, r = 1, b = 0.5, l = 0.5, "cm") 
  )


# Build ggplot and extract data
d <- ggplot_build(jj)$data[[1]]

# Add geom_ribbon for shaded area
jj +
  geom_ribbon(
    data = transform(subset(d, x >= 20), year = group),
    aes(x, ymin = ymin, ymax = ymax, group = group),
    fill = "red",
    alpha = 0.5) 

Answer 1

Some commenters say they cannot reproduce this problem, but it does absolutely exist. It's easier to see if we increase the line size:

library(ggridges)
library(ggplot2)
ggplot(iris, aes(x = Sepal.Length, y = Species)) + 
  geom_density_ridges(size = 2)

It's a property of how ggplot expands discrete scales. The density line extends beyond the normal additive expansion value that ggplot uses (the magnitude of which is the distance from the "setosa" baseline to the x axis). In this situation, ggplot expands the axis further, but only exactly to the maximum data point. Therefore, half of the line extends beyond the plot area at that maximum point and that half is cut off.

The upcoming ggplot2 2.3.0 (currently available via github) will have two new ways of dealing with this problem. First, you can set clip = "off" in the coordinate system to allow the line to extend beyond the plot range:

ggplot(iris, aes(x = Sepal.Length, y = Species)) + 
  geom_density_ridges(size = 2) +
  coord_cartesian(clip = "off")

Second, you can separately expand the bottom and the top part of the scale. For discrete scales, I prefer additive expansion, and I think in this case we want to make the lower value smaller than the default but the upper value quite a bit larger:

ggplot(iris, aes(x = Sepal.Length, y = Species)) + 
  geom_density_ridges(size = 2) +
  scale_y_discrete(expand = expand_scale(add = c(0.2, 1.5)))

Answer 2

Adding

scale_y_discrete(expand = c(0.01, 0))

did the trick.