How to assign colors to categorical variables in ggplot2 that have stable mapping?

Question

I\'ve been getting up to speed with R in the last month.

Here is my question:

What is a good way to assign colors to categorical variables in ggplot2 that ha

Answer 1

I am in the same situation pointed out by malcook in his comment: unfortunately the answer by Thierry does not work with ggplot2 version 0.9.3.1.

png("figure_%d.png")
set.seed(2014)
library(ggplot2)
dataset <- data.frame(category = rep(LETTERS[1:5], 100),
    x = rnorm(500, mean = rep(1:5, 100)),
    y = rnorm(500, mean = rep(1:5, 100)))
dataset$fCategory <- factor(dataset$category)
subdata <- subset(dataset, category %in% c("A", "D", "E"))

ggplot(dataset, aes(x = x, y = y, colour = fCategory)) + geom_point()
ggplot(subdata, aes(x = x, y = y, colour = fCategory)) + geom_point()

Here it is the first figure:

and the second figure:

As we can see the colors do not stay fixed, for example E switches from magenta to blu.

As suggested by malcook in his comment and by hadley in his comment the code which uses limits works properly:

ggplot(subdata, aes(x = x, y = y, colour = fCategory)) +       
    geom_point() + 
    scale_colour_discrete(drop=TRUE,
        limits = levels(dataset$fCategory))

gives the following figure, which is correct:

This is the output from sessionInfo():

R version 3.0.2 (2013-09-25)
Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu (64-bit)

locale:
 [1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NUMERIC=C              
 [3] LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8        LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8    
 [5] LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8    LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8   
 [7] LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NAME=C                 
 [9] LC_ADDRESS=C               LC_TELEPHONE=C            
[11] LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C       

attached base packages:
[1] methods   stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  base     

other attached packages:
[1] ggplot2_0.9.3.1

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
 [1] colorspace_1.2-4   dichromat_2.0-0    digest_0.6.4       grid_3.0.2        
 [5] gtable_0.1.2       labeling_0.2       MASS_7.3-29        munsell_0.4.2     
 [9] plyr_1.8           proto_0.3-10       RColorBrewer_1.0-5 reshape2_1.2.2    
[13] scales_0.2.3       stringr_0.6.2