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Asked: 2026-05-24T15:56:08+00:00

I’m using geom_smooth() from ggplot2 . In Hadley Wickham’s book (ggplot2 – Elegant Graphics

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I’m using geom_smooth() from ggplot2.

In Hadley Wickham’s book (“ggplot2 – Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis”) there is an example (page 51), where method="lm" is used. In the online manual there is no talk of the method argument. I see other Google results (and questions here) of people using method='loess'.

Is there a an exhaustive list somewhere that explains the options?

From what I can see, 'lm' draws a straight line, and 'loess' draws a very smooth curve. I assume there are others that draw more of a jagged line between reference points?

The se argument from the example also isn’t in the help or online documentation.

FWIW here is my code.

p <- ggplot(output8, aes(age, myoutcome, group=id, colour=year_diag_cat2)) +
  geom_line() + scale_y_continuous(limits = c(lwr,upr))
p + geom_smooth(aes(group=year_diag_cat2), method="loess", size=2, se=F)
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Sometimes it’s asking the question that makes the answer jump out. The methods and extra arguments are listed on the ggplot2 wiki stat_smooth page.

    Which is alluded to on the geom_smooth() page with:

    “See stat_smooth for examples of using built in model fitting if you
    need some more flexible, this example shows you how to plot the fits
    from any model of your choosing”.

    It’s not the first time I’ve seen arguments in examples for ggplot graphs that aren’t specifically in the function. It does make it tough to work out the scope of each function, or maybe I am yet to stumble upon a magic explicit list that says what will and will not work within each function.

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