Polar Charts [legacy] in R

How to create a polar chart in R. Three examples of polar line, polar scatter, and polar area chart.


New to Plotly?

Plotly is a free and open-source graphing library for R. We recommend you read our Getting Started guide for the latest installation or upgrade instructions, then move on to our Plotly Fundamentals tutorials or dive straight in to some Basic Charts tutorials.

Legacy Plots

These polar charts are legacy and will likely be deprecated in Plotly 2.0. Please see the new scatterpolar and scatterpolargl trace types for latest and greatest in Plotly polar coordinates.

Polar Scatter Chart

library(plotly)
fig <- plot_ly(
  plotly::mic, r = ~r, t = ~t, color = ~nms, alpha = 0.5, type = "scatter"
)

fig <- layout(fig, title = "Mic Patterns", orientation = -90)

fig
fig <- plot_ly(
  plotly::hobbs, r = ~r, t = ~t, color = ~nms, alpha = 0.5, type = "scatter"
)

fig <- layout(fig, title = "Hobbs-Pearson Trials", plot_bgcolor = toRGB("grey90"))

fig

Polar Area Chart

```{r}

fig <- plotly(plotly::wind, r = ~r, t = ~t) %>% addarea(color = ~nms)

fig <- layout(fig, radialaxis = list(ticksuffix = "%"), orientation = 270)

fig

```

Reference

See https://plotly.com/python/reference/#area 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)