How to Make a Density Plot in R

Density plots are single variable plots that let you get a sense of the distribution of a numeric variable. They are similar to histograms except that they create a continuous approximation of the distribution of a variable instead of showing the distribution as a series of discrete bars with heights determined by the number of records that fall within each bin.

Code used in this clip:

Load ggplot2 and data
library(tidyverse)

data ＜- diamonds

Densitiy plot in base R
plot(density(diamonds$price))


Density plot with ggplot2

data %＞% ggplot(aes(x = price)) +
        geom_density(color="midnightblue", fill="skyblue", alpha="0.5")


Code Clips are basic code explanations in 3 minutes or less. They are intended to be short reference guides that provide quick breakdowns and copy/paste access to code needed to accomplish common data science tasks. Think Stack Overflow with a video explanation.


* Note: YouTube does not allow greater than or less than symbols in the text description, so the code above may not be exactly the same as the code shown in the video! For R that means I may use = for assignment and the special Unicode large ＜ and ＞ symbols in place of the standard sized ones for dplyr pipes and comparisons. These special symbols should work as expected for R code on Windows, but may need to be replaced with standard greater than and less than symbols for other operating systems.

• #science_technology
• #r_density_plot
• #ggplot2_density_plot
• #density_plot_in_r
• #r_plotting
• #density_plot_in_ggplot2
• #code_clips
• #r_basics
• #how_to_make_a_density_plot_in_r
• #how_to_make_a_density_plot_in_ggplot
• #how_to_make_a_density_plot_in_ggplot2
• #density_plot_ggplot
• #density_plot_ggplot2
• #density
• #plot
• #distribution
• #make_a_density_plot_in_r
• #make_a_density_plot_in_ggplot
• #make_a_density_plot_in_ggplot2