Histogram with colored tail



A histogram displays the distribution of a numeric variable. This posts explains how to color both tails of the distribution in Basic R, without any package. This can be useful to highlight a part of the distribution.

Histogram Section About histogram

This example demonstrates how to color parts of the histogram. First of all, the hist function must be called without plotting the result using the plot=F option. It allows to store the position of each bin in an object (my_hist here).

Those bin borders are now available in the $breaks slot of the object, what allows to build a color vector using ifelse statements. Finally, this color vector can be used in a plot call.

# Create data
my_variable=rnorm(2000, 0 , 10)
 
# Calculate histogram, but do not draw it
my_hist=hist(my_variable , breaks=40  , plot=F)
 
# Color vector
my_color= ifelse(my_hist$breaks < -10, rgb(0.2,0.8,0.5,0.5) , ifelse (my_hist$breaks >=10, "purple", rgb(0.2,0.2,0.2,0.2) ))
 
# Final plot
plot(my_hist, col=my_color , border=F , main="" , xlab="value of the variable", xlim=c(-40,40) )

Related chart types


Violin
Density
Histogram
Boxplot
Ridgeline



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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