Reduce space on ends of discrete axis in ggplot boxplot

Question

I created a horizontal boxplot in ggplot2 (de-identified image below). What I'm trying to figure out is a way to reduce the size of the space on the y-axis (which is really the discrete x-axis), i.e. the height of the space from the top to "label1" and the same space at the bottom. I haven't had any luck so far. It looks like the axis goes from about 0 to 3 or so, with the lower box from 0.5-1.5 and the upper box from 1.5-2.5. If that's the case, I'd like the axis to go from about 0.3-2.7.

ggplot(box,aes(X_NAME_,COL1))+geom_boxplot()+
labs(y=NULL,x=NULL)+
stat_summary(fun.y=mean,geom='point')+theme_classic()+
annotate('text',y=4,x=2.5,label='label1')+
annotate('text',y=-2.25,x=1.5,label='label2')+
scale_x_discrete(labels=NULL)+theme(axis.ticks.y=element_blank())+
theme(axis.line.y=element_blank())+
scale_y_continuous(limits=c(-40,40))+
annotate('rect',xmin=0,xmax=3,ymin=-40,ymax=0, alpha=0.1)+
annotate('rect',xmin=0,xmax=3,ymin=0,ymax=40, alpha=0.3)+
coord_flip()

boxplot

GGamba · Accepted Answer · 2017-03-28 18:31:53Z

3

Have a look at the expand argument of scale_y/x_*:

?scale_x_discrete

expand A numeric vector of length two giving multiplicative and additive expansion constants. These constants ensure that the data is placed some distance away from the axes. The defaults are c(0.05, 0) for continuous variables, and c(0, 0.6) for discrete variables.

... +
scale_x_discrete(labels = NULL, expand = c(0, .2)) +
...

should do the trick in this case.

edited Mar 28, 2017 at 18:31

answered Mar 28, 2017 at 17:24

GGamba

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4 Comments

Scott Jackson Over a year ago

I'm a bit confused, you said scale_y but then wrote scale_x. Are you talking about using expand within my scale_x_discrete statement or scale_y_continuous?

GGamba Over a year ago

Yea, sry, edited. The argument applies to both. In your case you should put it in scale_x_continuous

Scott Jackson Over a year ago

Why does it go under continuous instead of discrete? It is a discrete axis.

GGamba Over a year ago

You are right. It works with any x/y scale thou, continuous or discrete.

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