Hexbin chart in R

Package

Author

Edzer Pebesma

The hexbin package
Color customization
Legend

The `hexbin` package

In base R it is possible to create a hexbin chart making use of the hexbin package, which contains a function of the same name to create a hexbin object that can be plotted.

# install.packages("hexbin")
library(hexbin)

# Data
set.seed(1)
x <- rnorm(5000)
y <- rnorm(5000)

hex <- hexbin(x, y)
plot(hex)

Basic hexbin chart in R

Number of bins

The xbins argument controls the number of bins. The default value is 30.

# install.packages("hexbin")
library(hexbin)

# Data
set.seed(1)
x <- rnorm(5000)
y <- rnorm(5000)

hex <- hexbin(x, y, xbins = 20)
plot(hex)

hexbin package number of bins

Color customization

Border color hexagons in hexbin package

Border color

The border color of the hexagons can be customized with the boder argument.

# install.packages("hexbin")
library(hexbin)

# Data
set.seed(1)
x <- rnorm(5000)
y <- rnorm(5000)

hex <- hexbin(x, y)
plot(hex, border = 4)

Hexbin chart color palette in R

Color palette

The default gray color palette can be customized passing a color ramp palette to the colramp argument. In the following example we are passing 12 colors of the viridis palette with the hcl.colors function.

# install.packages("hexbin")
library(hexbin)

# Data
set.seed(1)
x <- rnorm(5000)
y <- rnorm(5000)

hex <- hexbin(x, y)
plot(hex, colramp = colorRampPalette(hcl.colors(12)))

Legend

Legend width

The legend argument allows customizing the width of the default legend. However, if the value is too small the legend will be cropped. Default value is 1.2.

# install.packages("hexbin")
library(hexbin)

# Data
set.seed(1)
x <- rnorm(5000)
y <- rnorm(5000)

hex <- hexbin(x, y)
plot(hex, legend = 0.9)

hexbin package legend

Text size of the legend

You can also change the text size of the legend with lcex.

# install.packages("hexbin")
library(hexbin)

# Data
set.seed(1)
x <- rnorm(5000)
y <- rnorm(5000)

hex <- hexbin(x, y)
plot(hex, lcex = 0.9)

Text size hexbin package in R

Remove the legend

Finally, if you want to remove the legend set the legend argument to FALSE.

# install.packages("hexbin")
library(hexbin)

# Data
set.seed(1)
x <- rnorm(5000)
y <- rnorm(5000)

hex <- hexbin(x, y)
plot(hex, legend = FALSE,
     colramp = colorRampPalette(hcl.colors(12, "GnBu")))