Reorder Boxplot in R

In this article, we will discuss how to reorder the boxplot in the R programming language.

Reordering the boxplot manually using the factor function

Under this approach to reordering the boxplot, the user needs to call the factor function which is an inbuilt function of the R programming language, and then the user needs to pass the new order of the boxplot as per the requirement by the user in a vector as its parameters and further this process will be leading to the reordering of the boxplot as configured by the user in the R programming language.

Example 1:

In this example, we will be simply creating the boxplot of 6 different units each carrying 600 random data points with the help of the boxplot function and with the factor function we will be reordering the units in the R programming language

Initial boxplot without any modification:

R

# create a dataframe with letters and value
gfg < - data.frame(group=rep(c('A', 'B', 'C', 'D', 'E', 'F')),
                   values=rnorm(600))

# factor the data
gfg$group < - factor(gfg$group, c("F", "C", "B", "E", "D", "A"))

# plot the data
boxplot(gfg$values ~ gfg$group)

Output:

Example 2:

In this example, we will be simply creating the boxplot of 8 different units each carrying 800 random data points in the ggplot2 and with the factor function we will be reordering the units in the R programming language

Initial boxplot without any modification:

Example:

R

# load the library
library("ggplot2")

# get the data
gfg < - data.frame(group=rep(c('A', 'B', 'C', 'D', 'E',
                               'F', 'G', 'H')), values=rnorm(800))
gfg$group < - factor(gfg$group, c("G", "F", "C", "B", "H", "E", "D", "A"))

# plot the data
ggplot(gfg, aes(group, values)) + geom_boxplot()

Output: