Overlaying boxplot with histogram in ggplot2

Question

Hi I want to create a similar chart as shown below with R script:

taken from: https://community.tableau.com/thread/194440

this is my code in R :

Answer 1

You're getting Error: stat_bin() must not be used with a y aesthetic. because you can't specify y in the aesthetic of a histogram. If you want to mix plots that have different parameters, you need to supply distinct aesthetics. I'll demonstrate with iris like so:

ggplot(iris, aes(x = Sepal.Width)) + 
  geom_histogram(binwidth = 0.05) +
  geom_boxplot(aes(x = 3, y = Sepal.Width))

Unfortunately, the default for boxplots is vertical, for histograms is horizontal, and coord_flip() is all-or-nothing, so you're left with this awful thing:

Best I can figure out is instead of having them overlap, put one on top of the other with the gridExtra package:

a <- ggplot(iris, aes(x = Sepal.Width)) + 
  geom_histogram(binwidth = 0.05) 

b <- ggplot(iris, aes(x = "", y = Sepal.Width)) + 
  geom_boxplot() + 
  coord_flip()

grid.arrange(a,b,nrow=2)

which gives us something pretty good: