Customize your R treemap



How to customize your treemap built with R? Learn how to control borders, labels, and more. Several examples with reproducible code provided.

Treemap section Data to Viz

#Labels ***

This page aims to explain how to customize R treemaps. Make sure you already understood how to build a basic treemap with R.

The first step is to control label appearance. All the options are explained in the code below. Note that you can apply a different feature to each level of the treemap, for example using white for group labels, and orange for subgroup labels.

# library
library(treemap)
 
# Create data
group <- c(rep("group-1",4),rep("group-2",2),rep("group-3",3))
subgroup <- paste("subgroup" , c(1,2,3,4,1,2,1,2,3), sep="-")
value <- c(13,5,22,12,11,7,3,1,23)
data <- data.frame(group,subgroup,value)
 
# Custom labels:
treemap(data, index=c("group","subgroup"),     vSize="value", type="index",
 
    fontsize.labels=c(15,12),                # size of labels. Give the size per level of aggregation: size for group, size for subgroup, sub-subgroups...
    fontcolor.labels=c("white","orange"),    # Color of labels
    fontface.labels=c(2,1),                  # Font of labels: 1,2,3,4 for normal, bold, italic, bold-italic...
    bg.labels=c("transparent"),              # Background color of labels
    align.labels=list(
        c("center", "center"), 
        c("right", "bottom")
        ),                                   # Where to place labels in the rectangle?
    overlap.labels=0.5,                      # number between 0 and 1 that determines the tolerance of the overlap between labels. 0 means that labels of lower levels are not printed if higher level labels overlap, 1  means that labels are always printed. In-between values, for instance the default value .5, means that lower level labels are printed if other labels do not overlap with more than .5  times their area size.
    inflate.labels=F,                        # If true, labels are bigger when rectangle is bigger.
 
)

#Borders ***

You can control the border:

  • color with border.col
  • width with border.lwds

Remember that you can still provide a vector to each option: it gives the value for groups, subgroups and so on.

# Custom borders:
treemap(data, index=c("group","subgroup"), vSize="value", type="index",
 
    border.col=c("black","white"),             # Color of borders of groups, of subgroups, of subsubgroups ....
    border.lwds=c(7,2)                         # Width of colors
        
    )

#General features ***

A few other arguments for more general customization. The palette arguments accepts any palette from RColorBrewer.

# General features:
treemap(data, index=c("group","subgroup"), vSize="value", 
 
    type="index",                            # How you color the treemap. type help(treemap) for more info
    palette = "Set1",                        # Select your color palette from the RColorBrewer presets or make your own.
    title="My Treemap",                      # Customize your title
    fontsize.title=12,                       # Size of the title
 
) 

Related chart types


Grouped and Stacked barplot
Treemap
Doughnut
Pie chart
Dendrogram
Circular packing



Contact

This document is a work by Yan Holtz. Any feedback is highly encouraged. You can fill an issue on Github, drop me a message on Twitter, or send an email pasting yan.holtz.data with gmail.com.

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