Subset and ggplot2

Question

I have a problem to plot a subset of a data frame with ggplot2. My df is like:

df = data.frame(ID = c('P1', 'P1', 'P2', 'P2', 'P3', 'P3'),
                Value1 = c(100, 120, 300, 400, 130, 140),
                Value2 = c(12, 13, 11, 16, 15, 12))

How can I now plot Value1 vs Value2 only for IDs 'P1' and 'P3'? For example I tried:

ggplot(subset(df,ID=="P1 & P3") +
  geom_line(aes(Value1, Value2, group=ID, colour=ID)))

but I always receive an error.

Answer 1

Here 2 options for subsetting:

Using subset from base R:

library(ggplot2)
ggplot(subset(dat,ID %in% c("P1" , "P3"))) + 
         geom_line(aes(Value1, Value2, group=ID, colour=ID))

Using subset the argument of geom_line(Note I am using plyr package to use the special . function).

library(plyr)
ggplot(data=dat)+ 
  geom_line(aes(Value1, Value2, group=ID, colour=ID),
                ,subset = .(ID %in% c("P1" , "P3")))

You can also use the complementary subsetting:

subset(dat,ID != "P2")

Answer 2

There's another solution that I find useful, especially when I want to plot multiple subsets of the same object:

myplot<-ggplot(df)+geom_line(aes(Value1, Value2, group=ID, colour=ID))
myplot %+% subset(df, ID %in% c("P1","P3"))
myplot %+% subset(df, ID %in% c("P2"))

Answer 3

With option 2 in @agstudy's answer now deprecated, defining data with a function can be handy.

library(plyr)
ggplot(data=dat) + 
  geom_line(aes(Value1, Value2, group=ID, colour=ID),
            data=function(x){x$ID %in% c("P1", "P3"))

This approach comes in handy if you wish to reuse a dataset in the same plot, e.g. you don't want to specify a new column in the data.frame, or you want to explicitly plot one dataset in a layer above the other.:

library(plyr)
ggplot(data=dat, aes(Value1, Value2, group=ID, colour=ID)) + 
  geom_line(data=function(x){x[!x$ID %in% c("P1", "P3"), ]}, alpha=0.5) +
  geom_line(data=function(x){x[x$ID %in% c("P1", "P3"), ]})