Cleveland dot chart vs bar plot with R's ggplot2 (CC158)

October 28, 2021 • PD Schloss • 1 min read • •

So which is better in the Cleveland dot chart vs bar plot battle of plots? A Cleveland dot chart is a simple way to represent continuous data against categorical data. It is a nice alternative to the traditional bar plot, which uses a lot of ink to convey little extra information. I’m going with the Cleveland dot chart. Regardless it is straightforward to go back and forth between the figures by chaging a single line of ggplot2 R code. The data depict the percentage of people in 15 countries who would be willing to receive the COVID-19 vaccine as of August and October of 2020.

In this episode, Pat uses ggplot2 and dplyr to make a Cleveland dot chart and bar plot using geom_point and geom_col.

Code

You can browse the state of the repository at the

• beginning of the episode
• end of the episode

Data

The august_october_2020.csv data is available in the GitHub repository.

X.1,Total Agree - August 2020,Total Agree - October 2020
Total,77,73
India,87,87
China,97,85
South Korea,84,83
Brazil,88,81
Australia,88,79
United Kingdom,85,79
Mexico,75,78
Canada,76,76
Germany,67,69
Japan,75,69
South Africa,64,68
Italy,67,65
Spain,72,64
United States,67,64
France,59,54