Percentage stacked area chart in R

Package

areaplot

Author

Arni Magnusson

Sample data set

The data set used in the following examples is a subset of the longley data set, where the x variable represents the year and the y the measure of several variables for each year.

# Sample data set
df <- longley

# X-axis variable
x <- df$Year

# Variables to be stacked
y <- df[, c(1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7)]

Percentage stacked area chart

In order to create a percentage stacked area plot in R (also known as 100% stacked area chart) you can make use of the areaplot function of the package of the same name. You just need to pass your data an set prop = TRUE.

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

# Percentage stacked area chart
areaplot(x, y, prop = TRUE)

# Equivalent to:
areaplot(. ~ Year, data = df, prop = TRUE)

Percentage stacked area chart in R with areaplot

Color customization

Percent stacked area plot in R colors

You can pass a vector of colors to the col argument to customize the default gray scale. In the following example we are creating a vector of colors of the viridis color palette with a 0.8 level of transparency.

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

# Colors
cols <- hcl.colors(6, palette = "viridis", alpha = 0.8)

# Stacked area chart with custom colors
areaplot(x, y, prop = TRUE,
         col = cols)

R percentage stacked area chart border

The function allows passing additional arguments to the polygon function (used by the package). This allows customizing the border, line width and line type of the stacked areas.

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

# Colors
cols <- hcl.colors(6, palette = "ag_Sunset")

# Stacked area chart with custom borders
areaplot(x, y, prop = TRUE, col = cols,
         border = "white",
         lwd = 1,
         lty = 1)

Adding a legend

The function also provides a way to add an automatic legend setting legend = TRUE. Additional arguments of the legend function can be passed through args.legend as a list.

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

# Colors
cols <- hcl.colors(6, palette = "PinkYl")

areaplot(x, y, prop = TRUE, col = cols,
         legend = TRUE,
         args.legend = list(x = "topleft", cex = 0.65,
                            bg = "white", bty = "o"))

Percentage stacked area chart with legend in R