Order discrete x scale by frequency/value

r ggplot2 r-faq
lokheart picture lokheart · Jul 15, 2010 · Viewed 250.9k times · Source

I am making a dodged bar chart using ggplot with discrete x scale, the x axis are now arranged in alphabetical order, but I need to rearrange it so that it is ordered by the value of the y-axis (i.e., the tallest bar will be positioned on the left).

I tried order or sort, but result in sort the x-axis, but not the bars respectively.

What have I done wrong?

Answer

Yuriy Petrovskiy picture Yuriy Petrovskiy · Sep 19, 2011

The best way for me was using vector with categories in order I need as limits parameter to scale_x_discrete. I think it is pretty simple and straightforward solution.

ggplot(mtcars, aes(factor(cyl))) + 
  geom_bar() + 
  scale_x_discrete(limits=c(8,4,6))

enter image description here

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