Plotting sales over time in R

Question

I am trying to show the top 100 sales on a scatterplot by year. I used the below code to take top 100 games according to sales and then set it as a data frame.

top100 <- head(sort(games$NA_Sales,decreasing=TRUE), n = 100)
as.data.frame(top100)

I then tried to plot this with the below code:

ggplot(top100)+
  aes(x=Year, y = Global_Sales) +
    geom_point()

I bet the below error when using the subset top100 Error: data must be a data frame, or other object coercible by fortify(), not a numeric vector

if i use the actual games dataseti get the plot attached.

Any ideas?

`as.data.frame(top100)` does not work inplace - you need to do `top100=as.data.frame(top100)` — CMichael, Dec 13 '19 at 19:15
Thanks , i get this after that: Error: Aesthetics must be either length 1 or the same as the data (100): x, y....would this be due to NA's in the year column? — Gary, Dec 13 '19 at 19:38
Could you share a sample of your data using `dput` to reproduce your problem? In `ggplot` in this case of `geom_point`, missing data would give you a warning and remove the row of data. — Ben, Dec 13 '19 at 20:40

score 0 · Answer 1 · edited Jun 20 '20 at 09:12

As pointed out in comments by @CMichael, you have several issues in your code. In absence of reproducible example, I used iris dataset to explain you what is wrong with your code.

top100 <- head(sort(games$NA_Sales,decreasing=TRUE), n = 100)

By doing that you are only extracting a single column.

The same command with the iris dataset:

> head(sort(iris$Sepal.Length, decreasing = TRUE), n = 20)
 [1] 7.9 7.7 7.7 7.7 7.7 7.6 7.4 7.3 7.2 7.2 7.2 7.1 7.0 6.9 6.9 6.9 6.9 6.8 6.8 6.8

So, first, you do not have anymore two dimensions to be plot in your ggplot2. Second, even colnames are not kept during the extraction, so you can't after ask for ggplot2 to plot Year and Global_Sales.

So, to solve your issue, you can do (here the example with the iris dataset):

top100 = as.data.frame(head(iris[order(iris$Sepal.Length, decreasing = TRUE), 1:2], n = 100))

And you get a data.frame of of this type:

> str(top100)
'data.frame':   100 obs. of  2 variables:
 $ Sepal.Length: num  7.9 7.7 7.7 7.7 7.7 7.6 7.4 7.3 7.2 7.2 ...
 $ Sepal.Width : num  3.8 3.8 2.6 2.8 3 3 2.8 2.9 3.6 3.2 ...

> head(top100)
    Sepal.Length Sepal.Width
132          7.9         3.8
118          7.7         3.8
119          7.7         2.6
123          7.7         2.8
136          7.7         3.0
106          7.6         3.0

And then if you are plotting:

library(ggplot2)
ggplot(top100, aes(x = Sepal.Length, y = Sepal.Width)) + geom_point()

Warning Based on what you provided in your example, I will suggest you to do:

top100 <- as.data.frame(head(games[order(games$NA_Sales,decreasing=TRUE),c("Year","Global_Sales")], 100))

However, if this is not satisfying to you, you should consider to provide a reproducible example of your dataset How to make a great R reproducible example

Plotting sales over time in R

1 Answers1