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Essentially, I want to make one plot that has 5 boxplots in it. Each box representing the Min/1stQ/Mean/3rdQ/Max of each column, specifically in the ggplot2 library using geom_boxplot().

My confusion lies in the fact that geom_boxplot() wants to take variables as x and y parameters, but that's not what I want to do.

I want the X-axis to represent the columns, and the Y-axis to represent the Min/1stQ/Mean/3rdQ/Max of each of them.

AndrewGB
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TMcDaneldJr
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    Welcome to SO! Please see [How to make a great R reproducible example](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5963269/how-to-make-a-great-r-reproducible-example). You can provide your data via the output of `dput(df)` or to give a minimal subset use `dput(head(df))`. – AndrewGB Mar 05 '22 at 06:19
  • Please provide enough code so others can better understand or reproduce the problem. – Community Mar 05 '22 at 13:29

1 Answers1

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Since you do not provide any reproducible example, I assume that you have a data frame with five columns like this:

DF <- mtcars[,c(1,2,5,6,7)]
head(DF)
#                  mpg cyl drat    wt  qsec
#Mazda RX4         21.0   6 3.90 2.620 16.46
#Mazda RX4 Wag     21.0   6 3.90 2.875 17.02
#Datsun 710        22.8   4 3.85 2.320 18.61
#Hornet 4 Drive    21.4   6 3.08 3.215 19.44
#Hornet Sportabout 18.7   8 3.15 3.440 17.02
#Valiant           18.1   6 2.76 3.460 20.22

You want to make one plot that has 5 boxplots, each of which represents each column. It is likely that you want to get this.

boxplot(DF, xlab = "column_names", ylab = "column_values", las = 1)
grid()

enter image description here

However, you want to get a similar plot by using ggplot. If that's true, you need to transform DF so that all of the column names of DF are stored in a single column so that it can be assigned to x, which ggplot requires. Likewise, all the corresponding values should be stored in another column so that it can be assigned to y, which ggplot requires. You can do this transformation by using pivot_longer.

library(tidyverse)
newDF <- DF %>% 
         pivot_longer(col= everything(), 
                      values_to = "column_values", 
                      names_to = "column_names")

newDF
# A tibble: 160 x 2
#   column_names column_values
#   <chr>                <dbl>
# 1 mpg                  21   
# 2 cyl                   6   
# 3 drat                  3.9 
# 4 wt                    2.62
# 5 qsec                 16.5 
# 6 mpg                  21   
# 7 cyl                   6   
# 8 drat                  3.9 
# 9 wt                    2.88
#10 qsec                 17.0 
# ... with 150 more rows

It is now possible to plot 5 boxplots from newDF:

newDF %>% ggplot(aes(x = column_names, y = column_values)) +
 geom_boxplot(fill = "grey") + theme_bw()

Here is the resulted plot:

enter image description here

Abdur Rohman
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    This worked perfectly, thank you so much for your help. Apologies for my lackluster question, it was in a frantic "I don't know what to do" late night coding session, and I've never posted here before. Thanks again! – TMcDaneldJr Mar 05 '22 at 19:49
  • Glad if it helps. Next time, in case you want to post another question, it would be much better if you provide a reproducible example so that other users can understand quickly what you need. You can see the link in Andrew Gillreath-Brown's comment. – Abdur Rohman Mar 06 '22 at 00:56
  • Also, please kindly accept my answer if you find it helpful to solve your problem. – Abdur Rohman Mar 07 '22 at 02:30