Explain ggplot2 warning Removed k rows containing missing values

Question

I get this warning when I am trying to generate a plot with ggplot   After researching online for a while many suggested that my database contains either null values or missing data in general  which was not the case   In this question the accepted answer says the following      The warning means that some elements are removed because they fall out of the specified range   I was wondering what exactly does this range refer to and how can someone manually increase this range in order to avoid all warnings

User · Answer

Just for the shake of completing the answer given by eipi10.

I was facing the same problem, without using scale_y_continuous nor coord_cartesian.

The conflict was coming from the x axis, where I defined limits = c(1, 30). It seems such limits do not provide enough space if you want to "dodge" your bars, so R still throws the error

Removed 8 rows containing missing values (geom_bar)

Adjusting the limits of the x axis to limits = c(0, 31) solved the problem.

In conclusion, even if you are not putting limits to your y axis, check out your x axis' behavior to ensure you have enough space

User · Answer

Even if your data falls within your specified limits  e g  c 0  335    adding a geom jitter   statement could push some points outside those limits  producing the same error message  library ggplot2   range mtcars hp    gt   1   52 335    No jitter -- no error message ggplot mtcars  aes mpg  hp          geom point         scale y continuous limits c 0 335       Jitter is too large -- this generates the error message ggplot mtcars  aes mpg  hp          geom point         geom jitter position   position jitter w   0 2  h   0 2         scale y continuous limits c 0 335     gt  Warning  Removed 1 rows containing missing values  geom point    Created on 2020-08-24 by the reprex package  v0 3 0

User · Answer

The behavior you re seeing is due to how ggplot2 deals with data that are outside the axis ranges of the plot  You can change this behavior depending on whether you use scale y continuous  or  equivalently  ylim  or coord cartesian to set axis ranges  as explained below   library ggplot2     All points are visible in the plot ggplot mtcars  aes mpg  hp        geom point     In the code below  one point with hp   335 is outside the y-range of the plot  Also  because we used scale y continuous to set the y-axis range  this point is not included in any other statistics or summary measures calculated by ggplot  such as the linear regression line    ggplot mtcars  aes mpg  hp        geom point       scale y continuous limits c 0 300        Change this to limits c 0 335  and the warning disappars   geom smooth method  lm    Warning messages  1  Removed 1 rows containing missing values  stat smooth    2  Removed 1 rows containing missing values  geom point     In the code below  the point with hp   335 is still outside the y-range of the plot  but this point is nevertheless included in any statistics or summary measures that ggplot calculates  such as the linear regression line  This is because we used coord cartesian to set the y-axis range  and this function does not exclude points that are outside the plot ranges when it does other calculations on the data    If you compare this and the previous plot  you can see that the linear regression line in the second plot has a slightly steeper slope  because the point with hp 335 is included when calculating the regression line  even though it s not visible in the plot   ggplot mtcars  aes mpg  hp        geom point       coord cartesian ylim c 0 300       geom smooth method  lm

User · Answer

I ran into this as well  but in the case where I wanted to avoid the extra error messages while keeping the range provided  An option is also to subset the data prior to setting the range  so that the range can be kept however you like without triggering warnings  library ggplot2   range mtcars hp    gt   1   52 335    Setting limits with scale y continous  or ylim  and subsetting accordingly    avoid warning messages about removing data ggplot data  subset mtcars  hp lt  300  amp  hp  gt   100   aes mpg  hp        geom point       scale y continuous limits c 100 300

[r] Explain ggplot2 warning: "Removed k rows containing missing values"

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