Changing the x-axis labels of a ggplot histogram

Question

I have the following dataset (edited for readability):

chol <- read.table(url("http://assets.datacamp.com/blog_assets/chol.txt"), header = TRUE)

And I am creating a histogram of the data doing:

ggplot(data=chol, aes(chol$AGE)) + geom_histogram()

For a particular example I would like to change the x-labels however.

Any thoughts on how I can pull this of?

It might be helpful to have another hint on what is to be changed. I think you only want to apply a mapping from the (in this case with bins = 30) resulting 20, 30, 40, 50 and 60. But it would be better to know ;-) — Dilettant
– Dilettant, Commented Jun 2, 2016 at 10:27
use aes(AGE) rather than aes(chol$AGE). Use labs(x = "whatever") to set the x-axis label — Richard Telford
– Richard Telford, Commented Jun 2, 2016 at 10:29
My understanding was to not change the x-axis title but the labels on the tics of the x axis ... what is the right understanding? — Dilettant
– Dilettant, Commented Jun 2, 2016 at 10:40

Dilettant · Accepted Answer · 2016-06-02 10:38:44Z

0

To illustrate the answer (and better understand the question) a picture:

> require(ggplot2)
> chol <- read.table(url("http://assets.datacamp.com/blog_assets/chol.txt"), header = TRUE)
> ggplot(data=chol, aes(chol$AGE)) + geom_histogram()

yields:

There is the documentation (as we have a continuous not a discrete axis) at http://docs.ggplot2.org/current/scale_continuous.html

For a discrete axis one might have simply written:

> p <- ggplot(data=chol, aes(chol$AGE)) + geom_histogram() + scale_x_discrete(labels=c("20" = "twe", "30" = "thi", "40" = "fou", "50" = "fif", "60" = "six"))  # does NOT work cf. surrounding text.

A continuous axis at least allows formatting (cf. link for details).

edited Jun 2, 2016 at 10:38

answered Jun 2, 2016 at 10:29

Dilettant

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1 Comment

Gmichael Over a year ago

this is not really the solution to the question. There has to be some kind of a workaround... pls improve answer.

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