How can I change the y-axis scale range and order with times?

Question

Following a previous question about using hours in the y-axis of ggplot, I would like the hours in the y-axis to be from 19:00 to 07:00, starting at 19:00. All the times in the distress variable are within this range. I am showing trend lines (instead of regression lines, as in the previous question) to better show the issue.

I now have a plot in which the scale of the y-axis goes from 0:00:00 to 23:59:00, and the smooth line is in the middle of the afternoon hours, which is not logical. Here is the plot.

This is the code I used.

#Convert to hours format (do it after removing missings because it makes issues with missing values)
data_clean$distress_time <- as_hms(paste0(data_clean$distress, ':00'))

#Create plot:
lines<-ggplot(data = data_clean, aes(x=survey,y=distress_time, group=id, color=id))+
  facet_wrap(~PP_rec)+
  geom_line()+
  xlab("Survey")+ylab("Distress")+
  theme_bw()
lines

#a smoother for the overall group
lines_smooth <- lines + geom_smooth(aes(group = 1), se=FALSE, colour="black", size=1)
lines_smooth

#adjust plot:
smooth_lines2 <- lines_smooth + 
  labs(x = "Survey", y = "Distress", color = "id") +
  scale_y_time(limits = as.hms(c('00:00:00', '23:59:00')), breaks = hms(hours = seq(0, 23.99, 1))) +
  scale_x_continuous(breaks = seq(0, 16, 2)) +
  theme(text = element_text(size = 10))
smooth_lines2

This is an example of two participants' relevant data (the original database is very large):

structure(list(id = structure(c(1L, 1L, 1L, 1L, 1L, 1L, 1L, 1L, 1L, 1L, 9L, 9L, 9L, 9L, 9L, 9L, 9L, 9L, 9L, 9L), levels = c("400", "401", "402", "403", "404", "405", "406", "407", "408", "409", "411", "412", "413", "414", "415", "550", "551", "552", "553", "554", "555", "558", "559", "560", "561", "563", "565", "566", 
"567", "568", "569", "570", "571", "572", "573", "574", "575", 
"576", "577", "578", "580", "590", "591"), class = "factor"), 
distress = c("23:45", "23:30", "23:30", "23:45", "23:30", 
    "22:30", "23:30", "21:30", "23:45", "22:45", "0:00", "1:00", 
    "6:15", "0:00", "1:00", "0:00", "2:00", "2:00", "2:00", "1:45"
    ), survey = c(1, 4, 6, 9, 11, 1, 3, 5, 8, 11, 1, 4, 7, 9, 
    12, 1, 4, 7, 10, 12)))

#The PP_rec indicates whether it was before or after an event.

How can I set the y-axis scale from 19:00 to 07:00, starting at 19:00, and get a logical smooth line?

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 13 '23 at 07:54

One option would be to convert your times to proper date times so that you could add a date to reflect that your desired time ranges refer to "different" days.

library(hms)
library(ggplot2)
library(dplyr)
library(lubridate)

data_clean <- data_clean |>
  mutate(
    distress_time2 = if_else(
      distress_time < as_hms("07:00:00"),
      as_datetime(paste("2023-03-14", distress_time)),
      as_datetime(paste("2023-03-13", distress_time))
    )
  )

limits <- as_datetime(
  c(
    paste("2023-03-13", "19:00:00"),
    paste("2023-03-14", "07:00:00")
  )
)

ggplot(data = data_clean, aes(x = survey, y = distress_time2, group = id, color = id)) +
  geom_line() +
  geom_smooth(aes(group = 1), se = FALSE, colour = "black", size = 1) +
  theme_bw() +
  labs(x = "Survey", y = "Distress", color = "id") +
  scale_y_datetime(date_breaks = "hour", date_labels = "%H:%M", limits = limits) +
  scale_x_continuous(breaks = seq(0, 16, 2)) +
  theme(text = element_text(size = 10))

How can I change the y-axis scale range and order with times?

1 Answers1