Variable width bars in ggplot2 barplot in R

Question

I'm trying to produce a barplot with bar widths determined by an integer variable (sample size). Adding "width = variableName" doesn't seem to work. Is there an established way of doing this? Here's some dummy data and code. I want the bar widths to be a function of variable d in this example.

dat <- data.frame(a=c("A", "B", "C"), b=c(0.71, 0.94, 0.85), d=c(32, 99, 18))

ggplot(dat, aes(x=a, y=b, fill=a)) +  
geom_bar(colour="black", size=.3) + 
theme_bw()

score 39 · Accepted Answer · answered May 10 '11 at 11:01

39

How about using width= after rescaling your d vector, say by a constant amount?

ggplot(dat, aes(x=a, y=b, width=d/100)) + 
  geom_bar(aes(fill=a), stat="identity", position="identity")

enter image description here

answered May 10 '11 at 11:01

chl

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@chi: that's great, thanks a lot. I'd already tried this approach, but without the 'stat' and 'position' arguments it didn't affect the bar widths. – Steve May 10 '11 at 11:29
Is it possible to add the width of the bars in the legend ? – fstevens Nov 26 '15 at 10:30
THANK YOU! I was missing the position argument :) – Felipe Gerard Jan 25 '17 at 17:24
how would you apply this to percent charts such the answer for https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46984296/proportion-with-ggplot-geom-bar – Skyler Aug 18 '19 at 01:25

Variable width bars in ggplot2 barplot in R

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