How would I ignore outliers in ggplot2 boxplot? I don't simply want them to disappear (i.e. outlier.size=0), but I want them to be ignored such that the y axis scales to show 1st/3rd percentile. My outliers are causing the "box" to shrink so small its practically a line. Are there some techniques to deal with this?
Edit Here's an example:
y = c(.01, .02, .03, .04, .05, .06, .07, .08, .09, .5, -.6)
qplot(1, y, geom="boxplot")
Answer
Use geom_boxplot(outlier.shape = NA) to not display the outliers and scale_y_continuous(limits = c(lower, upper)) to change the axis limits.
An example.
n <- 1e4L
dfr <- data.frame(
y = exp(rlnorm(n)), #really right-skewed variable
f = gl(2, n / 2)
)
p <- ggplot(dfr, aes(f, y)) +
geom_boxplot()
p # big outlier causes quartiles to look too slim
p2 <- ggplot(dfr, aes(f, y)) +
geom_boxplot(outlier.shape = NA) +
scale_y_continuous(limits = quantile(dfr$y, c(0.1, 0.9)))
p2 # no outliers plotted, range shifted
Actually, as Ramnath showed in his answer (and Andrie too in the comments), it makes more sense to crop the scales after you calculate the statistic, via coord_cartesian.
coord_cartesian(ylim = quantile(dfr$y, c(0.1, 0.9)))
(You'll probably still need to use scale_y_continuous to fix the axis breaks.)