ggplot geom_bar() bar width - super-wide with tiny amounts of data points?

[Darya]

I encountered a bizarre result when trying to plot some data - geom_bar() generated super-wide bars for one of my datasets (and not others, which also had data in this range). I've reduced the example to exclude the facet_grid() code, as the strange behaviour persists. I've figured out how to "fix" it (geom_bar(width = 1)), but I'd love to know what the default was doing...

Reprex:

mydata <-
data.frame(
  stringsAsFactors = FALSE,
                 type = c("A",
                          "A","A","A",
                          "B","B","B","B","B",
                          "B","B","B","B","B",
                          "B","B","B","B","B",
                          "B","B","B","B","B",
                          "B","B","B","B","B",
                          "B","B","B","B","B",
                          "B","B","B","B","B",
                          "B","B","B","B","B",
                          "B","B","B","B","B",
                          "B","B","B","B",
                          "B","B","B","B","B",
                          "B","B","B","B","B",
                          "B","B","B","B","B",
                          "B","B","B","B","B",
                          "B","B","B","B","B",
                          "B","B","B","B","B",
                          "B","B","B","B","B",
                          "B","B","B","B","B",
                          "B","B","B","B","B",
                          "B","B","B","B"),
          Duration_me = c(1096,1096,1096,1827,
                          30,30,30,30,30,30,30,30,30,30,30,30,30,30,
                          30,30,30,30,30,30,30,30,30,30,30,30,30,
                          30,30,30,30,30,30,30,30,30,30,30,30,30,30,
                          30,30,30,30,30,30,30,30,30,30,30,30,30,
                          30,30,30,30,30,30,30,30,30,30,30,30,366,
                          182,183,181,182,30,181,184,184,182,184,184,
                          184,181,181,181,184,184,181,365,365,181,182,
                          182,365,181,181,181,366,366,366,184))

mydata %>% ggplot(aes(x = Duration_me, fill = type)) + geom_bar()  + xlab("Duration")+ ylab("Number of people")

Notice the super-wide red bars on the right - they actually correspond to only 3 and 1 cases, respectively, but they're heaps wider than the ones plotted for B!

What was going on under the hood?

[joels]

Welcome Darya!

The help for the width argument of geom_bar says "By default, set to 90% of the resolution of the data." Since type is mapped to the fill aesthetic, it looks like geom_bar is calculating the default width separately for each level of type. The minimum distance between values of Duration_me for type=="A" is 1827 - 1096 = 731, meaning the bar widths for type="A" should therefore be 657.9.

If you run the following code, where we use the default bar width or a hard-coded bar-width of 657.9, (we also set the x-axis limits so that the type=="B" values aren't plotted), you can see that indeed this is the case:

library(ggplot2)
library(patchwork)
theme_set(theme_classic())

p = mydata %>% 
  ggplot(aes(x = Duration_me, fill=type)) + 
    scale_x_continuous(limits=c(650,2200), 
                       breaks=c(unique(mydata$Duration_me), 
                                1096 + 657.9/2*c(-1,1)))

{p + geom_bar()} / {p + geom_bar(width=657.9)}

On the other hand, the minimum distance between values of Duration_me for type=="B" is only 1, resulting in thin bars.

If we make the following change to the data:

mydata[1,2] = 1000

reducing the minimum resolution to 96 for type=="A", and then redo the plot, we see that the bar widths now reflect the new resolution.

mydata %>% 
  ggplot(aes(x = Duration_me, fill=type)) + 
    geom_bar() +
    scale_x_continuous(breaks=unique(mydata$Duration_me)) 

As you noted, you can change this behavior with the width argument, but the fact that the default gives different widths for different levels of the fill variable was counterintuitive to me.

[Matthias]

Awesome explanation and indeed a strange situation.

Darya, you can also use higher widths, e.g. widths = 20. Although ggplot complains about this it migh look a bit more pleasently.