Adding Space between my geom_histogram bars-not barplot

Question

Let's say I want to make a histogram

So I use the following code

v100<-c(runif(100))

v100
library(ggplot2)
private_plot<-ggplot()+aes(v100)+geom_histogram(binwidth = (0.1),boundary=0
)+scale_x_continuous(breaks=seq(0,1,0.1), lim=c(0,1))
private_plot

How do I separate my columns so that the whole thing is more pleasing to the eye?

I tried this but it somehow doesn't work:

Adding space between bars in ggplot2

Thanks

see i have an actual histogram with many colums of the same height. They look like one grey blob. — Marvin Schopf, Jul 03 '17 at 15:45
I am not sure what you want, but histograms dont have spaces. https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/56122/why-do-histograms-not-have-spaces-in-between-bars-as-opposed-to-a-bar-graph — S Rivero, Jul 03 '17 at 15:50
You probably want to add more bins: `ggplot()+aes(v100)+geom_histogram(bins=50)+scale_x_continuous(breaks=seq(0,1,0.1), lim=c(0,1))` — S Rivero, Jul 03 '17 at 15:58
this is no duplicate to the other question(barplot). My question is about histograms. — Marvin Schopf, Jul 03 '17 at 16:40

KoenV · Accepted Answer · 2017-07-03T16:12:55.570

15

You could set the line color of the histogram bars with the col parameter, and the filling color with the fill parameter. This is not really adding space between the bars, but it makes them visually distinct.

library(ggplot2)
set.seed(9876)
v100<-c(runif(100))

### use "col="grey" to set the line color
ggplot() +
  aes(v100) +
  geom_histogram(binwidth = 0.1, fill="black", col="grey") +
  scale_x_continuous(breaks = seq(0,1,0.1), lim = c(0,1))

Yielding this graph:

Please let me know whether this is what you want.

edited Jul 03 '17 at 16:12

answered Jul 03 '17 at 16:04

KoenV

4,113
2
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38

5

Definitely, not related with the tittle of the question – S Rivero Jul 03 '17 at 16:18

score 7 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 29 '19 at 12:54

If you want to increase the space for e.g. to indicate that values are discrete, one thing to do is to plot your histogram as a bar plot. In that case, you have to summarize the data yourself, and use geom_col() instead of geom_histogram(). If you want to increase the space further, you can use the width parameter.

library(tidyverse)
lambda <- 1:6

pois_bar <- 
    map(lambda, ~rpois(1e5, .x)) %>% 
    set_names(lambda) %>% 
    as_tibble() %>% 
    gather(lambda, value, convert = TRUE) %>% 
    count(lambda, value)

pois_bar %>% 
    ggplot() +
    aes(x = value, y = n) +
    geom_col(width = .5) +
    facet_wrap(~lambda, scales = "free", labeller = "label_both")

score 3 · Answer 3 · answered Mar 18 '19 at 20:49

Just use color and fill options to distinguish between the body and border of bins:

library(ggplot2)
set.seed(1234)
df <- data.frame(sex=factor(rep(c("F", "M"), each=200)),
                 weight=round(c(rnorm(200, mean=55, sd=5), rnorm(200, mean=65, sd=5))))

ggplot(df, aes(x=weight)) + 
geom_histogram(color="black", fill="white")

score 2 · Answer 4 · answered Feb 27 '20 at 18:58

2

In cases where you are creating a "histogram" over a range of integers, you could use:

ggplot(data) + geom_bar(aes(x = value, y = ..count..))

answered Feb 27 '20 at 18:58

Amadou Kone

907
11
21

score 1 · Answer 5 · edited Apr 07 '21 at 03:12

I just came across this issue. My solution was to add vertical lines at the points separating my bins. I use "theme_classic" and have a white background. I set my bins to break at 10, 20, 30, etc. So I just added 9 vertical lines with:

geom_vline(xintercept=10, linetype="solid", color = "white", size=2)+
geom_vline(xintercept=20, linetype="solid", color = "white", size=2)+
etc

A silly hack, but it works.

Adding Space between my geom_histogram bars-not barplot

5 Answers5

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