Mean time plot — ggseqmtplot • ggseqplot

Function for rendering plot displaying the mean time spent in each state of a state sequence object using ggplot2 (Wickham 2016) instead of base R's plot function that is used by TraMineR::seqplot (Gabadinho et al. 2011) .

Usage

ggseqmtplot(
  seqdata,
  no.n = FALSE,
  group = NULL,
  weighted = TRUE,
  with.missing = FALSE,
  border = FALSE,
  error.bar = NULL,
  error.caption = TRUE,
  facet_scale = "fixed",
  facet_ncol = NULL,
  facet_nrow = NULL
)

Arguments

seqdata: State sequence object (class stslist) created with the TraMineR::seqdef function.
no.n: specifies if number of (weighted) sequences is shown (default is TRUE)
group: A vector of the same length as the sequence data indicating group membership. When not NULL, a distinct plot is generated for each level of group.
weighted: Controls if weights (specified in TraMineR::seqdef) should be used. Default is TRUE, i.e. if available weights are used
with.missing: Specifies if missing states should be considered when computing the state distributions (default is FALSE).
border: if TRUE bars are plotted with black outline; default is FALSE (also accepts NULL)
error.bar: allows to add error bars either using the standard deviation "SD" or the standard error "SE"; default plot is without error bars
error.caption: a caption is added if error bars are displayed; this default behavior can be turned off by setting the argument to "FALSE"
facet_scale: Specifies if y-scale in faceted plot should be "fixed" (default) or "free_y"
facet_ncol: Number of columns in faceted (i.e. grouped) plot
facet_nrow: Number of rows in faceted (i.e. grouped) plot

Value

A mean time plot created by using ggplot2. If stored as object the resulting list object (of class gg and ggplot) also contains the data used for rendering the plot

Details

The information on time spent in different states is obtained by an internal call of TraMineR::seqmeant. This requires that the input data (seqdata) are stored as state sequence object (class stslist) created with the TraMineR::seqdef function. The resulting output then is prepared to be plotted with ggplot2::geom_bar. The data and specifications used for rendering the plot can be obtained by storing the plot as an object. The appearance of the plot can be adjusted just like with every other ggplot (e.g., by changing the theme or the scale using + and the respective functions).

References

Gabadinho A, Ritschard G, Müller NS, Studer M (2011). “Analyzing and Visualizing State Sequences in R with TraMineR.” Journal of Statistical Software, 40(4), 1--37. doi:10.18637/jss.v040.i04 .

Wickham H (2016). ggplot2: Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis, Use R!, 2nd ed. edition. Springer, Cham. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-24277-4 .

Author

Marcel Raab

Examples

# Use example data from TraMineR: actcal data set
data(actcal)

# We use only a sample of 300 cases
set.seed(1)
actcal <- actcal[sample(nrow(actcal), 300), ]
actcal.lab <- c("> 37 hours", "19-36 hours", "1-18 hours", "no work")
actcal.seq <- seqdef(actcal, 13:24, labels = actcal.lab)
#>  [>] 4 distinct states appear in the data: 
#>      1 = A
#>      2 = B
#>      3 = C
#>      4 = D
#>  [>] state coding:
#>        [alphabet]  [label]  [long label] 
#>      1  A           A        > 37 hours
#>      2  B           B        19-36 hours
#>      3  C           C        1-18 hours
#>      4  D           D        no work
#>  [>] 300 sequences in the data set
#>  [>] min/max sequence length: 12/12

# modal state sequence plot; grouped by sex
# with TraMineR::seqplot
seqmtplot(actcal.seq, group = actcal$sex)

# with ggseqplot
ggseqmtplot(actcal.seq, group = actcal$sex)

# with ggseqplot using additional arguments and some adjustments
ggseqmtplot(actcal.seq, no.n = TRUE, error.bar = "SE") +
 coord_flip() +
 theme(axis.text.y=element_blank(),
       axis.ticks.y = element_blank(),
       panel.grid.major.y = element_blank(),
       legend.position = "top")