How to generate a number of most distinctive colors in R

Question

I am plotting a categorical dataset and want to use distinctive colors to represent different categories  Given a number n  how can I get n number of MOST distinctive colors in R  Thanks

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You can use the Polychrome package for this purpose  It just requires the number of colors and a few seedcolors  For example    install packages  quot Polychrome quot   library Polychrome     create your own color palette based on  seedcolors  P36   createPalette 36   c  quot  ff0000 quot    quot  00ff00 quot    quot  0000ff quot    swatch P36    You can learn more about this package at https   www jstatsoft org article view v090c01

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Not an answer to OP s question but it s worth mentioning that there is the viridis package which has good color palettes for sequential data  They are perceptually uniform  colorblind safe and printer-friendly   To get the palette  simply install the package and use the function viridis pal    There are four options  A    B    C  and  D  to choose  install packages  viridis   library viridis  viridis pal option    D   n     n   number of colors seeked           There is also an excellent talk explaining the complexity of good colormaps on YouTube   A Better Default Colormap for Matplotlib   SciPy 2015   Nathaniel Smith and St  fan van der Walt

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Here are a few options   Have a look at the palette function   palette rainbow 6         six color rainbow   palette gray seq 0  9 len   25      grey scale   And the colorRampPalette function     Move from blue to red in four colours  colorRampPalette c  quot blue quot    quot red quot     4     Look at the RColorBrewer package  and website   If you want diverging colours  then select diverging on the site  For example   library RColorBrewer   brewer pal 7   quot BrBG quot     The I want hue web site gives lots of nice palettes  Again  just select the palette that you need  For example  you can get the rgb colours from the site and make your own palette   palette c rgb 170 93 152  maxColorValue 255        rgb 103 143 57  maxColorValue 255        rgb 196 95 46  maxColorValue 255        rgb 79 134 165  maxColorValue 255        rgb 205 71 103  maxColorValue 255        rgb 203 77 202  maxColorValue 255        rgb 115 113 206  maxColorValue 255

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I found a website offering a list of 20 distinctive colours  https   sashat me 2017 01 11 list-of-20-simple-distinct-colors   col vector lt -c   e6194b     3cb44b     ffe119     4363d8     f58231     911eb4     46f0f0     f032e6     bcf60c     fabebe     008080     e6beff     9a6324     fffac8     800000     aaffc3     808000     ffd8b1     000075     808080     ffffff     000000     You can have a try

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In my understanding searching distinctive colors is related to search efficiently from an unit cube  where 3 dimensions of the cube are three vectors along red  green and blue axes  This can be simplified to search in a cylinder  HSV analogy   where you fix Saturation  S  and Value  V  and find random Hue values  It works in many cases  and see this here    https   martin ankerl com 2009 12 09 how-to-create-random-colors-programmatically   In R   get distinct hues  lt - function ncolor s 0 5 v 0 95 seed 40      golden ratio conjugate  lt - 0 618033988749895   set seed seed    h  lt - runif 1    H  lt - vector  numeric  ncolor    for i in seq len ncolor         h  lt -  h   golden ratio conjugate     1     H i   lt - h       hsv H s s v v      An alternative way  is to use R package  uniformly   https   cran r-project org web packages uniformly index html  and this simple function can generate distinctive colors   get random distinct colors  lt - function ncolor seed   100      require uniformly    set seed seed    rgb mat  lt - runif in cube n ncolor d 3 O rep 0 5 3  r 0 5    rgb r rgb mat  1  g rgb mat  2  b rgb mat  3       One can think of a little bit more involved function by grid-search   get random grid colors  lt - function ncolor seed   100      require uniformly    set seed seed    ngrid  lt - ceiling ncolor  1 3     x  lt - seq 0 1 length ngrid 1  1 ngrid    dx  lt -  x 2  - x 1   2   x  lt - x   dx   origins  lt - expand grid x x x    nbox  lt - nrow origins     RGB  lt - vector  numeric  nbox    for i in seq len nbox         rgb  lt - runif in cube n 1 d 3 O as numeric origins i    r dx      RGB i   lt - rgb rgb 1 1  rgb 1 2  rgb 1 3         index  lt - sample seq 1 nbox  ncolor    RGB index       check this functions by   ncolor  lt - 20 barplot rep 1 ncolor  col get distinct hues ncolor              approach 1 barplot rep 1 ncolor  col get random distinct colors ncolor     approach 2 barplot rep 1 ncolor  col get random grid colors ncolor         approach 3   However  note that  defining a distinct palette with human perceptible colors is not simple  Which of the above approach generates diverse color set is yet to be tested

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You can generate a set of colors like this   myCol   c  pink1    violet    mediumpurple1    slateblue1    purple    purple3              turquoise2    skyblue    steelblue    blue2    navyblue              orange    tomato    coral2    palevioletred    violetred    red2              springgreen2    yellowgreen    palegreen4              wheat2    tan    tan2    tan3    brown              grey70    grey50    grey30     These colors are as distinct as possible  For those similar colors  they form a gradient so that you can easily tell the differences between them

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I joined all qualitative palettes from RColorBrewer package  Qualitative palettes are supposed to provide X most distinctive colours each  Of course  mixing them joins into one palette also similar colours  but that s the best I can get  74 colors    library RColorBrewer  n  lt - 60 qual col pals   brewer pal info brewer pal info category     qual    col vector   unlist mapply brewer pal  qual col pals maxcolors  rownames qual col pals    pie rep 1 n   col sample col vector  n       Other solution is  take all R colors from graphical devices and sample from them  I removed shades of grey as they are too similar  This gives 433 colors  color   grDevices  colors   grep  gr a e y   grDevices  colors    invert   T       pie rep 1 n   col sample color  n     with 200 colors n   200   pie rep 1 n   col sample color  n

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I would recomend to use an external source for large color palettes   http   tools medialab sciences-po fr iwanthue    has a service to compose any size of palette according to various parameters and   https   graphicdesign stackexchange com questions 3682 where-can-i-find-a-large-palette-set-of-contrasting-colors-for-coloring-many-d 3815  discusses the generic problem from a graphics designers perspective and gives lots of examples of usable palettes   To comprise a palette from RGB values you just have to copy the values in a vector as in e g    colors37   c   466791    60bf37    953ada    4fbe6c    ce49d3    a7b43d    5a51dc    d49f36    552095    507f2d    db37aa    84b67c    a06fda    df462a    5b83db    c76c2d    4f49a3    82702d    dd6bbb    334c22    d83979    55baad    dc4555    62aad3    8c3025    417d61    862977    bba672    403367    da8a6d    a79cd4    71482c    c689d0    6b2940    d593a7    895c8b    bd5975

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You can use colorRampPalette from base or RColorBrewer package   With colorRampPalette  you can specify colours as follows   colorRampPalette c  red    green    5     1    FF0000    BF3F00    7F7F00    3FBF00    00FF00    You can alternatively provide hex codes as well   colorRampPalette c   3794bf     FFFFFF     df8640    5     1    3794BF    9BC9DF    FFFFFF    EFC29F    DF8640    Note that the mid color is the mid value      With RColorBrewer you could use colors from pre-existing palettes   require RColorBrewer  brewer pal 9   Set1      1    E41A1C    377EB8    4DAF4A    984EA3    FF7F00    FFFF33    A65628    F781BF     9    999999    Look at RColorBrewer package for other available palettes  Hope this helps

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You can also try the randomcoloR package   library randomcoloR  n  lt - 20 palette  lt - distinctColorPalette n    You can see that a set of highly distinct colors are chosen when visualizing in a pie chart  as suggested by other answers here    pie rep 1  n   col palette      Shown in a pie chart with 50 colors   n  lt - 50 palette  lt - distinctColorPalette n  pie rep 1  n   col palette

[r] How to generate a number of most distinctive colors in R?

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