Question

Is there a way to set a constant width for geom_bar() in the event of missing data in the time series example below? I’ve tried setting width in aes() with no luck. Compare May ’11 to June ’11 width of bars in the plot below the code example.

colours <- c("#FF0000", "#33CC33", "#CCCCCC", "#FFA500", "#000000" )
iris$Month <- rep(seq(from=as.Date("2011-01-01"), to=as.Date("2011-10-01"), by="month"), 15)

colours <- c("#FF0000", "#33CC33", "#CCCCCC", "#FFA500", "#000000" )
iris$Month <- rep(seq(from=as.Date("2011-01-01"), to=as.Date("2011-10-01"), by="month"), 15)
d<-aggregate(iris$Sepal.Length, by=list(iris$Month, iris$Species), sum)
d$quota<-seq(from=2000, to=60000, by=2000)
colnames(d) <- c("Month", "Species", "Sepal.Width", "Quota")
d$Sepal.Width<-d$Sepal.Width * 1000
g1 <- ggplot(data=d, aes(x=Month, y=Quota, color="Quota")) + geom_line(size=1)
g1 + geom_bar(data=d[c(-1:-5),], aes(x=Month, y=Sepal.Width, width=10, group=Species, fill=Species), stat="identity", position="dodge") + scale_fill_manual(values=colours)

Answer 1

The easiest way is to supplement your data set so that every combination is present, even if it has NA as its value. Taking a simpler example (as yours has a lot of unneeded features):

dat <- data.frame(a=rep(LETTERS[1:3],3),
                  b=rep(letters[1:3],each=3),
                  v=1:9)[-2,]

ggplot(dat, aes(x=a, y=v, colour=b)) +
  geom_bar(aes(fill=b), stat="identity", position="dodge")

This shows the behavior you are trying to avoid: in group “B”, there is no group “a”, so the bars are wider. Supplement dat with a dataframe with all the combinations of a and b:

dat.all <- rbind(dat, cbind(expand.grid(a=levels(dat$a), b=levels(dat$b)), v=NA))

ggplot(dat.all, aes(x=a, y=v, colour=b)) +
  geom_bar(aes(fill=b), stat="identity", position="dodge")