In this article, we will discuss how to create horizontal boxplots in the R programming language.
Method 1: Create Horizontal boxplot in base R
In this method to create the horizontal bar plot, the user simply needs to call the boxplot() function which is a base function of the R language, then the user needs to call the horizontal argument of this function and initialize it with true value to get the box plot in a horizontal way.
boxplot() function: This function is used to produce box-and-whisker plot(s) of the given values.
Syntax: boxplot(formula, data = NULL, …, horizontal = TRUE)
Parameters:
- formula: a formula, such as y ~ grp, where y is a numeric vector of data values to be split into groups according to the grouping variable grp.
- data: a data.frame (or list) from which the variables in the formula should be taken.
- horizontal: logical indicating if the boxplots should be horizontal.
- … : Other parameters
Example: In this example, we are taking a data frame with 2 variables to create the horizontal boxplot of the given variable using the boxplot with a horizontal argument with it in the R programming language.
R
gfg<- data.frame (x= c (6,8,9,6,4,7,6,3,4),
y= c (4,6,8,7,8,4,5,1,3))
boxplot (gfg,horizontal= TRUE )
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Output:

Method 2: Create a Horizontal boxplot using coord_flip()
In this method to create the horizontal boxplot in ggplot2, the user needs to install and import the ggplot2 package in the working R console, here the ggplot2 package is responsible to plot the boxplot and provide other functionalities of the package. Then the user needs to simply call the geom_boxplot() function which will be simply plotting the boxplot in the vertical way of the given data and with it the user also needs to call the coord_flip() which will be flipping the axis and the final boxplot will be resulting in the horizontal boxplot in the R programming language.
Syntax to import and install ggplot2 package in R language:
install.package("ggplot2")
library("ggplot2")
coord_flip() function: This function is used to flip cartesian coordinates so that horizontal becomes vertical, and vertical, horizontal.
Syntax: coord_flip(…)
Parameters:
- …: Other arguments passed
Example: In this example, we will be using the geom_boxplot() function with the coord_flip() function from the ggplot2 package to plot the horizontal boxplot of the given data in the R programming language.
R
library (ggplot2)
gfg<- data.frame (x= c (6,8,9,6,4,7,6,3,4,9,6,3),
grp= rep ( c ( 'A' , 'B' , 'C' , 'D' ),
each=3))
ggplot (gfg, aes (x=grp,y=x)) + geom_boxplot () + coord_flip ()
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Output:
