plotting grouped bar charts in R

Question

i am trying to plot this data in R -

column1  column2  column3
1-2       abc       10
1-2       def       15
1-2       ghi       20
2-3       abc       80
2-         


        

Answer 1

I like to use ggplot2 for this kind of task.

#Make the data reproducible:
column1 <- c(rep("1-2", 3), rep("2-3", 3), rep("3-4", 3))
column2 <- gl(3, 1, 9, labels=c("abc", "def", "ghi"))
column3 <- c(10, 15, 20, 80, 95, 10, 30, 55, 80)

d <- data.frame(column1=column1, column2=column2, column3=column3)

require(ggplot2)
ggplot(d, aes(x=column1, y=column3, fill=column2)) + geom_bar(position=position_dodge())

The reason I find this intuitive (after a bit of a learning period) is that you clearly stated what you want on the x and y axes, and we simply tell ggplot that (as well as which variable defines the 'fill' color, and which kind of plot - here, geom_bar - to use.