Plotting multiple time series on the same plot using ggplot

Question

I am fairly new to R and am attempting to plot two time series lines simultaneously  using different colors  of course  making use of ggplot2    I have 2 data frames  the first one has  Percent change for X  and  Date  columns   The second one has  Percent change for Y  and  Date  columns as well  i e   both have a  Date  column with the same values whereas the  Percent Change  columns have different values     I would like to plot the  Percent Change  columns against  Date   common to both  using ggplot2 on a single plot    The examples that I found online made use of the same data frame with different variables to achieve this  I have not been able to find anything that makes use of 2 data frames to get to the plot  I do not want to bind the two data frames together  I want to keep them separate  Here is the code that I am using   ggplot jobsAFAM  aes x jobsAFAM data date  y jobsAFAM Percent Change     geom line       xlab       ylab       But this code produces only one line and I would like to add another line on top of it  Any help would be much appreciated  TIA

User · Answer

I know this is old but it is still relevant. You can take advantage of reshape2::melt to change the dataframe into a more friendly structure for ggplot2.

Advantages:

allows you plot any number of lines
each line with a different color
adds a legend for each line
with only one call to ggplot/geom_line

Disadvantage:

an extra package(reshape2) required
melting is not so intuitive at first

For example:

jobsAFAM1 <- data.frame(
  data_date = seq.Date(from = as.Date('2017-01-01'),by = 'day', length.out = 100),
  Percent.Change = runif(5,1,100)
)

jobsAFAM2 <- data.frame(
  data_date = seq.Date(from = as.Date('2017-01-01'),by = 'day', length.out = 100),
  Percent.Change = runif(5,1,100)
)

jobsAFAM <- merge(jobsAFAM1, jobsAFAM2, by="data_date")

jobsAFAMMelted <- reshape2::melt(jobsAFAM, id.var='data_date')

ggplot(jobsAFAMMelted, aes(x=data_date, y=value, col=variable)) + geom_line()

User · Answer

ggplot allows you to have multiple layers  and that is what you should take advantage of here   In the plot created below  you can see that there are two geom line statements hitting each of your datasets and plotting them together on one plot  You can extend that logic if you wish to add any other dataset  plot  or even features of the chart such as the axis labels   library ggplot2   jobsAFAM1  lt - data frame    data date   runif 5 1 100     Percent Change   runif 5 1 100     jobsAFAM2  lt - data frame    data date   runif 5 1 100     Percent Change   runif 5 1 100     ggplot        geom line data   jobsAFAM1  aes x   data date  y   Percent Change   color    red       geom line data   jobsAFAM2  aes x   data date  y   Percent Change   color    blue       xlab  data date       ylab  percent change

User · Answer

I prefer using the ggfortify library  It is a ggplot2 wrapper that recognizes the type of object inside the autoplot function and chooses the best ggplot methods to plot  At least I don t have to remember the syntax of ggplot2   library ggfortify  ts1  lt - 1 100 ts2  lt - 1 100 0 8 autoplot ts  cbind ts1  ts2     start   c 2010 5   frequency   12             facets   FALSE

User · Answer

If both data frames have the same column names then you should add one data frame inside ggplot   call and also name x and y values inside aes   of ggplot   call  Then add first geom line   for the first line and add second geom line   call with data df2  where df2 is your second data frame   If you need to have lines in different colors then add color  and name for eahc line inside aes   of each geom line     df1 lt -data frame x 1 10 y rnorm 10   df2 lt -data frame x 1 10 y rnorm 10    ggplot df1 aes x y   geom line aes color  First line       geom line data df2 aes color  Second line       labs color  Legend text

User · Answer

An alternative is to bind the dataframes  and assign them the type of variable they represent  This will let you use the full dataset in a tidier way  library ggplot2  library dplyr   df1  lt - data frame dates   1 10 Variable   rnorm mean   0 5 10   df2  lt - data frame dates   1 10 Variable   rnorm mean   -0 5 10    df3  lt - df1   gt     mutate Type    a     gt     bind rows df2   gt                 mutate Type    b      ggplot df3 aes y   Variable x   dates color   Type        geom line

User · Answer

This is old  just update new tidyverse workflow not mentioned above   library tidyverse   jobsAFAM1  lt - tibble      date   seq Date from   as Date  2017-01-01   by    day   length out   5       Percent Change   runif 5  0 1          gt        mutate serial  jobsAFAM1   jobsAFAM2  lt - tibble      date   seq Date from   as Date  2017-01-01   by    day   length out   5       Percent Change   runif 5  0 1          gt        mutate serial  jobsAFAM2   jobsAFAM  lt - bind rows jobsAFAM1  jobsAFAM2   ggplot jobsAFAM  aes x date  y Percent Change  col serial     geom line      Chris Njuguna  tidyr  gather   is the one in tidyverse workflow to turn wide dataframe to long tidy layout  then ggplot could plot multiple serials

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