Question

Can I provide a parameter to the ggpairs function in the GGally package to use log scales for some, not all, variables?

Answer 1

You can’t provide the parameter as such (a reason is that the function creating the scatter plots is predefined without scale, see ggally_points), but you can change the scale afterward using getPlot and putPlot. For instance:

custom_scale <- ggpairs(data.frame(x=exp(rnorm(1000)), y=rnorm(1000)),
upper=list(continuous='points'), lower=list(continuous='points'))
subplot <- getPlot(custom_scale, 1, 2) # retrieve the top left chart
subplotNew <- subplot + scale_y_log10() # change the scale to log
subplotNew$type <- 'logcontinuous' # otherwise ggpairs comes back to a fixed scale
subplotNew$subType <- 'logpoints'
custom_scale <- putPlot(custom_fill, subplotNew, 1, 2)