ggplot: Log scale with linear labels

Question

I wish to log transform my data but have an axis with linear values that correspond to the log ticks. For example, in page 3 of the following PDF from Iversen and Soskice 2002. The data has been transformed, but the labels are in their corresponding linear values for readability.

http://faculty.washington.edu/cadolph/vis/vishw1.pdf

Here is some reproducible data and my start to the plot:

set.seed(51)
data<-data.frame(country=letters[1:14], 
                 poverty=runif(14,min=1,max=100),
                 parties=runif(14,min=1,max=10))

ggplot(data, aes(parties, poverty))+
  geom_point(size=2)+
  scale_x_log10()

Any ideas? I have seen other similar questions but none of them have working answers (e.g. Linear Ticks on a log plot in R's GGplot).

score 10 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 17 '18 at 20:30

10

Try trans inside scale_x_contineous, which transform axis only.

ggplot(data, aes(parties, poverty))+
    geom_point(size=2)+
    scale_x_continuous(
        trans = "log10",
        breaks = 1:10
    )

answered Jan 17 '18 at 20:30

GL_Li

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The only difference between your graph and the OP's is the `breaks = 1:10`. Switching to `scale_x_continuous` with `trans` has no difference compared to `scale_x_log10` – Michael Dewar Oct 31 '20 at 02:35

score 7 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 17 '18 at 21:40

7

coord_trans does exactly that:

ggplot(data, aes(parties, poverty))+
  geom_point(size=2)+
  coord_trans(x = 'log10')

answered Jan 17 '18 at 21:40

Axeman

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score 6 · Answer 3 · answered Jan 17 '18 at 20:43

This is similar to the other two answers, but gives you something a little different:

ggplot(data, aes(parties, poverty))+
  geom_point(size=2)+
  scale_x_log10(breaks = scales::log_breaks(n = 10)) +
  annotation_logticks(sides = "b")

if you want it on both the x and y axis then you need to add:

 scale_y_log10(breaks = scales::log_breaks(n = 10))

and change sides = "b" to sides = "bl" in the annotation_logticks() function.

score 3 · Answer 4 · answered Jan 17 '18 at 19:26

3

That's what the breaks parameter covers (checkout ?scale_x_log10).

For your current question, you could modify the last line to:

scale_x_log10(breaks = 1:999)

or

scale_x_log10(breaks = 2*(1:999))  # just even numbers

etc.

answered Jan 17 '18 at 19:26

David Klotz

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ggplot: Log scale with linear labels

4 Answers4