Dumbbell Plots in R

How to make a dumbbell plot in R. Dumbbell plots show changes between two points in time or between two conditions.

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Dot and Dumbbell Plots

s <- read.csv("https://raw.githubusercontent.com/plotly/datasets/master/school_earnings.csv")
# order factor levels by men's income (plot_ly() will pick up on this ordering)
s$School <- factor(s$School, levels = s$School[order(s$Men)])

library(plotly)
fig <- plot_ly(s, color = I("gray80"))
fig <- fig %>% add_segments(x = ~Women, xend = ~Men, y = ~School, yend = ~School, showlegend = FALSE)
fig <- fig %>% add_markers(x = ~Women, y = ~School, name = "Women", color = I("pink"))
fig <- fig %>% add_markers(x = ~Men, y = ~School, name = "Men", color = I("blue"))
fig <- fig %>% layout(
    title = "Gender earnings disparity",
    xaxis = list(title = "Annual Salary (in thousands)"),
    margin = list(l = 65)
  )

fig

Reference

See https://plotly.com/r/reference/#scatter for more information and chart attribute options!

What About Dash?

Dash for R is an open-source framework for building analytical applications, with no Javascript required, and it is tightly integrated with the Plotly graphing library.

Learn about how to install Dash for R at https://dashr.plot.ly/installation.

Everywhere in this page that you see fig, you can display the same figure in a Dash for R application by passing it to the figure argument of the Graph component from the built-in dashCoreComponents package like this:

library(plotly)

fig <- plot_ly() 
# fig <- fig %>% add_trace( ... )
# fig <- fig %>% layout( ... ) 

library(dash)
library(dashCoreComponents)
library(dashHtmlComponents)

app <- Dash$new()
app$layout(
    htmlDiv(
        list(
            dccGraph(figure=fig) 
        )
     )
)

app$run_server(debug=TRUE, dev_tools_hot_reload=FALSE)