Making a a four quadrant proportional area chart in R

Question

I am looking for a method, using ggplot2 or grid, to make a chart like the one below. I can recreate this in Tableau, but am not sure where to begin (data setup, packages) to do so in R. Any help recreating this would be great! I am hoping to use a chart like this in the future.

Answer 1

You can try working with this function.

four_quadrant <- function(x, col_quad="gray65", col_text="white") {    
  nx <- length(x)
  sqx <- sqrt(x) 
  df <- data.frame(x=c(sqx[1],-sqx[2],-sqx[3],sqx[4])/2, 
                   y=c(sqx[1],sqx[2],-sqx[3],-sqx[4])/2, 
                   size=sqx, label=x)
  mm <- max(df$size)*1.1

  ggplot(data=df, aes(x=x, y=y, width=size, height=size, 
            group=factor(size))) +
    geom_tile(fill=col_quad) +
    geom_text(aes(label=label), col=col_text, size=5) +
    geom_hline(aes(yintercept=0), size=0.8) +
    geom_vline(aes(xintercept=0), size=0.8) +
    coord_fixed() +
    xlim(c(-mm,mm)) + ylim(c(-mm,mm)) +
    theme_void() +
    theme(legend.position = "none")
}

x <- c(18, 54, 5, 15)
p1 <- four_quadrant(x)

x <- c(30, 17, 6, 34)
p2 <- four_quadrant(x, col_quad="salmon")

gridExtra::grid.arrange(p1, p2, nrow=1)

Answer 2

You can rather easily do it with ggplot using geom_rect. I've created a mock up data of the first chart to show you how to create one plot. You can reuse this to create the others and put them together using grid (there are loads of examples on SO how to do this).

library(tidyverse)

df <- data.frame(perc = c(54, 18, 5, 15),
                 wall_policy = c("oppose", "favor", "oppose", "favor"),
                 dreamer_policy = c("favor", "favor", "oppose", "oppose"),
                 stringsAsFactors = FALSE)
df <- df %>% 
  mutate(xmin = if_else(wall_policy == "oppose", -sqrt(perc), 0),
         xmax = if_else(wall_policy == "favor", sqrt(perc), 0),
         ymin = if_else(dreamer_policy == "oppose", -sqrt(perc), 0),
         ymax = if_else(dreamer_policy == "favor", sqrt(perc), 0))
ggplot(df) + 
  geom_rect(aes(xmin=xmin, xmax=xmax, ymin=ymin, ymax=ymax), fill = "grey") +
  geom_text(aes(x = xmin + 0.5*sqrt(perc),
                y = ymin + 0.5*sqrt(perc),
                label = perc),
            color = "white", size = 10) +
  coord_equal() +
  geom_hline(yintercept = 0) +
  geom_vline(xintercept = 0) +
  labs(title = "Total") +
  theme_minimal() +
  theme(axis.text = element_blank(),
        axis.title = element_blank(),
        panel.grid = element_blank(),
        plot.title = element_text(color="grey40", face="bold", 
                                  size=20, hjust = 0.5))