1st Edition

Interactive Web-Based Data Visualization with R, plotly, and shiny

By Carson Sievert Copyright 2020
    448 Pages
    by Chapman & Hall

    448 Pages
    by Chapman & Hall

    The richly illustrated Interactive Web-Based Data Visualization with R, plotly, and shiny focuses on the process of programming interactive web graphics for multidimensional data analysis. It is written for the data analyst who wants to leverage the capabilities of interactive web graphics without having to learn web programming. Through many R code examples, you will learn how to tap the extensive functionality of these tools to enhance the presentation and exploration of data. By mastering these concepts and tools, you will impress your colleagues with your ability to quickly generate more informative, engaging, and reproducible interactive graphics using free and open source software that you can share over email, export to pdf, and more.

    Key Features:

    • Convert static ggplot2 graphics to an interactive web-based form
    • Link, animate, and arrange multiple plots in standalone HTML from R
    • Embed, modify, and respond to plotly graphics in a shiny app
    • Learn best practices for visualizing continuous, discrete, and multivariate data
    • Learn numerous ways to visualize geo-spatial data

    This book makes heavy use of plotly for graphical rendering, but you will also learn about other R packages that support different phases of a data science workflow, such as tidyr, dplyr, and tidyverse. Along the way, you will gain insight into best practices for visualization of high-dimensional data, statistical graphics, and graphical perception. The printed book is complemented by an interactive website where readers can view movies demonstrating the examples and interact with graphics.

    Introduction

    Why interactive web graphics from R?

    What you will learn

    What you won’t learn (much of)

    Web technologies

    djs

    ggplot

    Graphical data analysis

    Data visualization best practices

    Prerequisites

    Run code examples

    Getting help and learning more

    Acknowledgements

    Colophon

    I Creating views

    Overview

    Intro to plot_ly()

    Intro to plotlyjs

    Intro to ggplotly()

    Scattered foundations

    Markers

    Alpha blending

    Colors

    Symbols

    Stroke and span

    Size

    Dotplots & error bars

    Lines

    Linetypes

    Segments

    Density plots

    Parallel Coordinates

    Polygons

    Ribbons

    Maps

    Integrated maps

    Overview

    Choropleths

    Custom maps

    Simple features (sf)

    Cartograms

    Bars & histograms

    Multiple numeric distributions

    Multiple discrete distributions

    Boxplots

    D frequencies

    Rectangular binning in plotlyjs

    Rectangular binning in R

    Categorical axes

    D charts

    Markers

    Paths

    Lines

    Axes

    Surfaces

    II Publishing views

    Introduction

    Saving and embedding HTML

    Exporting static images

    With code

    From a browser

    Sizing exports

    Editing views for publishing

    III Combining multiple views

    Arranging views

    Arranging plotly objects

    Recursive subplots

    Other approaches & applications

    Arranging htmlwidgets

    Flexdashboard

    Bootstrap grid layout

    CSS flexbox

    Arranging many views

    Animating views

    Animation API

    Animation support

    IV Linking multiple views

    Introduction

    Client-side linking

    Graphical queries

    Highlight versus filter events

    Linking animated views

    Examples

    Querying facetted charts

    Statistical queries

    Statistical queries with ggplotly()

    Geo-spatial queries

    Linking with other htmlwidgets

    Generalized pairs plots

    vi Contents

    Querying diagnostic plots

    Limitations

    Server-side linking with shiny

    Embedding plotly in shiny

    Your first shiny app

    Hiding and redrawing on resize

    Leveraging plotly input events

    Dragging events

    D events

    Edit events

    Relayout vs restyle events

    Scoping events

    Event priority

    Handling discrete axes

    Accumulating and managing event data

    Improving performance

    Partial plotly updates

    Partial update examples

    Advanced applications

    Drill-down

    Cross-filter

    A draggable brush

    Discussion

    V Event handling in JavaScript

    Introduction

    Working with JSON

    Assignment, subsetting, and iteration

    Mapping R to JSON

    Adding custom event handlers

    Supplying custom data

    Leveraging web technologies from R

    Web infrastructure

    Modern JS & React

    VI Various special topics

    Is plotly free & secure?

    Improving performance

    Controlling tooltips

    plot_ly() tooltips

    ggplotly() tooltips

    Styling

    Control the modebar

    Remove the entire modebar

    Remove the plotly logo

    Remove modebar buttons by name

    Add custom modebar buttons

    Control image downloads

    Working with colors

    Working with symbols and glyphs

    Embedding images

    Language support

    LaTeX rendering

    MathJax caveats

    The data-plot-pipeline

    Improving ggplotly()

    Modifying layout

    Modifying data

    Leveraging statistical output

    Translating custom ggplot geoms

    Biography

    Carson Sievert is the author and maintainer of the plotly R package, a recipient of the American Statistical Association’s 2017 John Chambers award, and Program Chair of the Section on Statistical Graphics. After receiving a PhD in statistics from Iowa State, Carson joined RStudio as a software engineer to work on software that bridges R and web technologies such as shiny, plotly, and rmarkdown.

    "Plotly is the most-downloaded interactive graphics system for R, and this book should help all plotly users—both new and experienced—understand more about plotly graphics. With this in mind, I feel that this book (once it makes its way to a final form) will have a wide appeal for a large swath of R users. This audience will include both statisticians and data scientists, and a wide range of education and experience levels, ranging from the novice student to the seasoned data scientist to the statistics faculty member…I suspect a book on plotly will be wildly successful."
    ~Adam Loy, Carleton College

    "This book is well-written and well-structured. The potential readership of this book is those who would like to learn or master interactive data visualization with R, and I’m not aware of any competing books in this regard. Both novice R users and experts could find this book useful and learn about plotly more systematically. Data practitioners could obtain lots of practical advice on how to make their plotly applications more responsive and more aesthetically appealing. I would also recommend this book as the textbook for courses that focus on data visualisation using web technology."
    ~Earo Wang, Monash University

    "This book fills a gap in the currently-available texts, providing information on making interactive graphics in R. I recently taught a course entitled ‘Advanced Statistical Software,’ and found it difficult to locate resources on plot.ly and shiny. As far as I know, this is the first book to really cover these topics. As with many other books published by Chapman and Hall, the availability of the website version of the book is extremely useful for the R community. I have already used materials from the web version, but if I were to teach this course again I would consider making the paper book a required text…Because Dr. Sievert wrote the plotly R package, he is clearly the world expert in the material. He also brings a wealth of general visualization knowledge to the book, which is full of rich references to other materials."
    ~Amelia McNamara, University of St. Thomas

    "This text would be an excellent resource for an advanced (graduate level) data visualization course. I think it could also be very valuable in data journalism coursework, where interactivity is a powerful communication tool. The book is very clearly written, and there are plenty of examples to demonstrate the tools to the reader…I especially enjoyed that the author provides the reader with a link to an RStudio cloud environment with which to run all of the examples in the book on their own. I believe this is an essential piece to this and any other modern computing text."
    ~Sam Tyner

    "Some sections of this book will be very useful for two classes I teach. One is introduction to data science where I teach about JSON and HTML data and how to display them. The second course is a data visualization course where I teach interactive visualization…Currently, I am recommending several books. This book will certainly be an addition, in the sense that it provides detailed materials on interactive visualization."
    ~Mahbubul Majumder, University of Nebraska