Introduction

Intermediate Interactive Data Visualization with plotly in R

Adam Loy

Statistician, Carleton College

Motivation

Animated scatterplot of CO2 emissions against per capita GDP for 1985-2014

Is it easier to see the changes over time based on the animation? Or the faceted views?

plotly

Visualization library for interactive and dynamic web-based graphics
Still under active development

Types of graphics

Static
Interactive
Dynamic

Static graphics

A static graphic is permanently fixed after it is created

Time series plot of ACWI in 2017

Interactive graphics

An interactive graphic changes based on an action performed by the user

Example of hover and zoom interactions

Dynamic graphics

A dynamic graphic changes periodically without user input

Animated time series plot of ACWI closing prices in 2017

plotly review

msci

# A tibble: 251 x 7
   Date        Open  High   Low Close Volume Adjusted
   <date>     <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl>  <int>    <dbl>
 1 2017-01-03  79.8  79.8  78.4  78.7 646000     77.4
 2 2017-01-04  79.1  81.1  79.1  80.7 849200     79.3
 3 2017-01-05  80.4  81.8  80.4  81.6 557500     80.2
 4 2017-01-06  81.8  83.9  81.8  83.4 597800     82.0
 5 2017-01-09  83.1  83.5  82.6  82.7 668100     81.3
 6 2017-01-10  82.3  82.6  81.1  81.5 558900     80.1
 7 2017-01-11  81.2  81.6  80.8  81.5 365500     80.1
# ... with 244 more rows

plotly review

library(plotly)

msci %>%
  plot_ly(x = ~Date, y = ~Close) %>%
  add_lines()

Interactive time series plot

Let's practice!

Intermediate Interactive Data Visualization with plotly in R