Code Through Assignment

Introduction

gganimate package makes it poosible to create animation in R. gganimate is an extention of ggplot2, which belongs to ggplot family. gganimate allows to add tranistions, changes in views, and shadows to the map in form of animation. When creating an animation, plot does not move. Instead, many plots are created simulatneously and stiched together to give an illusion of the movement. For better animation a data set should be able to generate more plots.

Getting started

The following packages and libraries are needed for this purpose.

# install.packages() cannot be included in an RMD file when knitting

#install.packages("prettydoc")
#install.packages("ggplot2")
#devtools::install_github('thomasp85/gganimate',force = TRUE)
#install.packages ("viridis")
#install.packages("dplyr")
#install.packages("readr")
#install.packages("animation")

#load_packages

library(knitr)
library(prettydoc)
library(ggplot2)
library(gganimate)
library(viridis)
library(dplyr)
library(readr)
library(animation)
library (tidyverse)

An excerpt of dataset from Gapminder.org is used for this assignment. gapmider package is availbale in CRAN or github, the main obeject is gapminder tibble. The dataset contains life expectancy, GDP, total population, every five years from 1952 to 2007 for 142 countries.

#install.packages("gapminder")

library(gapminder)
head (gapminder)

The basic ggplot function presents plot in static form.

Static plot

plot1 <- ggplot(
  gapminder, 
  aes(x = gdpPercap, y=lifeExp, size = pop, colour = country)
  ) +
  geom_point(show.legend = FALSE, alpha = 0.5) +
  scale_color_viridis_d() +
  scale_size(range = c(2, 12)) +
  scale_x_log10() +
  labs(x = "GDP per capita", y = "Life expectancy")
plot1

Using function from the library gganimate animation can be produced.

Animation

Animation using transition

using transition_time() the transition length between the states will be set to correspond to the actual time difference between them.

label variable frame_time gives the time that the current frame corresponds to.

theme_set(theme_bw())
fig2<- ggplot(gapminder, aes(x = gdpPercap, y=lifeExp, size = pop, colour = country)) +
  geom_point(show.legend = FALSE, alpha = 0.7) +
  scale_colour_manual(values = country_colors) +
  scale_size(range = c(2, 12)) +
  scale_x_log10() +
  labs(x = "GDP per capita", y = "Life expectancy")+ transition_time(year) +
  labs(title = "Year: {frame_time}")
setwd("~/Desktop/figures")
anim_save("fig2.gif", fig2)

Animation using change in view

theme_set(theme_bw())
fig3 <- ggplot(gapminder, aes(gdpPercap, lifeExp, size = pop, colour = country)) +
  geom_point(alpha = 0.7) +
  scale_colour_manual(values = country_colors) +
  scale_size(range = c(2, 12)) +
  scale_x_log10() +
  facet_wrap(~continent) +
  theme(legend.position = 'none') +
  labs(title = 'Year: {frame_time}', x = 'GDP per capita', y = 'life expectancy') +
  transition_time(year) +
  ease_aes('linear')

setwd("~/Desktop/figures")
anim_save("fig3.gif", fig3)

Animation using original data as background mark or shadows.

theme_set(theme_bw())
fig4<- ggplot(gapminder, aes(x = gdpPercap, y=lifeExp, size = pop, colour = country)) +
  geom_point(show.legend = FALSE, alpha = 0.7) +
  scale_colour_manual(values = country_colors) +
  scale_size(range = c(2, 12)) +
  scale_x_log10() +
  labs(x = "GDP per capita", y = "Life expectancy")+ transition_time(year) +
  labs(title = "Year: {frame_time}") + shadow_mark(alpha = 0.3, size = 0.5)
setwd("~/Desktop/figures")
anim_save("fig4.gif", fig4)

Acknowledgement

There are many functions available within this package. The following resources were used to create this tutorial for the assignment. To explore more please click the following links.