Reordering factors

Categorical Data in the Tidyverse

Emily Robinson

Data Scientist

A bar chart with the response on the x-axis, count on the y-axis, and the title "how often do you use NLP at work?" The bars, from left to right, are most of the time, often, rarely, and sometimes.

Corrected graph

ggplot(aes(nlp_frequency, 
            x = fct_relevel(response, 
            "Rarely", "Sometimes", "Often", "Most of the time"))) + 
        geom_bar()

The same bar chart as before, now ordered, from left to right, rarely, sometimes, often, most of the time.

fct_reorder()

nlp_frequency %>%
    pull(response) %>%
    levels()

[1] "Most of the time" "Often" "Rarely" "Sometimes"

nlp_frequency %>%
    mutate(response = fct_relevel(response, 
            "Often", "Most of the time")) %>%
    pull(response) %>%
    levels()

[1] "Often" "Most of the time" "Rarely" "Sometimes"

Additional arguments

nlp_frequency %>%
    mutate(response = fct_relevel(response, 
            "Often", "Most of the time", after = 2)) %>%
            pull(response) %>%
            levels()

nlp_frequency %>%
    mutate(response = fct_relevel(response, 
            "Often", "Most of the time", after = Inf) %>%
    pull(response) %>%
    levels()

[1] "Rarely" "Sometimes" "Often" "Most of the time"

Let's practice!

Categorical Data in the Tidyverse