Bubble Chart in R with # of Occurrences / Sums of Values

Question

I\'m playing around with drawing bubble charts in R -- the current project is to graph a bubble chart of political donations that has the following characteristics:

Answer 1

This is easy when you use the ggplot2 package with geom_point.

One of many benefits of using ggplot is that the built-in statistics means you don't have to pre-summarise your data. geom_point in combination with stat_sum is all you need.

Here is the example from ?geom_point. (Note that mtcars is a built-in dataset with ggplot2.)

See the ggplot website and geom_point for more detail.

library(ggplot2)
ggplot(mtcars, aes(wt, mpg)) + geom_point(aes(size = qsec))

Answer 2

You can use ddply from package plyr here. If your original data.frame was called dfr, then something close to this should work:

result<-ddply(dfr, .(CTRIB_AMT), function(partialdfr){data.frame(amt=partialdfr$CTRIB_AMT[1], sm=sum(partialdfr$CTRIB_AMT), mn=mean(partialdfr$CTRIB_AMT)) })

In fact, a base R solution is also rather simple:

vals<-sort(unique(dfr$CTRIB_AMT))
sums<-tapply( dfr$CTRIB_AMT, dfr$CTRIB_AMT, sum)
counts<-tapply( dfr$CTRIB_AMT, dfr$CTRIB_AMT, length)

I'm sure more elegant solutions exist.