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

The easiest solution is to convert your categorical variable to a factor prior to the subsetting. Bottomline is that you need a factor variable with exact the same levels in all your subsets.

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"))

With a character variable

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

With a factor variable

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