Highlighting particular regions of a scatterplot in a ggplot

Question

I need to discuss a scatter plot and would like to refer to particular regions of the plot. Is there any way to \'highlight\' particular sections of the plot? Perhaps with boxes

Answer 1

For a single region, it's easiest to use annotate, first with rect, then text:

p + annotate("rect", xmin=1.5, xmax=2.5, ymin=12500, ymax= 18000, 
             fill=NA, colour="red") +
    annotate("text", x=1.75, y=17000, label="Region A", size=8)

---

For multiple regions, you can put the data into a data frame and use geom_text and geom_rect:

regions <- data.frame(
  xmin=c(1.5, 1, 0),
  xmax=c(2.5, 2, 1),
  ymin=c(12500, 5000, 0),
  ymax=c(17500, 12500, 5000),
  x   =c(2, 1.5, 0.5),
  y   =c(15000, 7500, 2500),
  lab = paste("Region", LETTERS[1:3])
)

p + 
  geom_rect(data=regions, aes(xmin=xmin, xmax=xmax, ymin=ymin, ymax=ymax), 
            fill=NA, colour="red") +
  geom_text(data=regions, aes(x=x, y=y, label=lab))