Show percent % instead of counts in charts of categorical variables

Question

I\'m plotting a categorical variable and instead of showing the counts for each category value.

I\'m looking for a way to get ggplot to display the perc

Answer 1

Since this was answered there have been some meaningful changes to the ggplot syntax. Summing up the discussion in the comments above:

 require(ggplot2)
 require(scales)

 p <- ggplot(mydataf, aes(x = foo)) +  
        geom_bar(aes(y = (..count..)/sum(..count..))) + 
        ## version 3.0.0
        scale_y_continuous(labels=percent)

Here's a reproducible example using mtcars:

 ggplot(mtcars, aes(x = factor(hp))) +  
        geom_bar(aes(y = (..count..)/sum(..count..))) + 
        scale_y_continuous(labels = percent) ## version 3.0.0

This question is currently the #1 hit on google for 'ggplot count vs percentage histogram' so hopefully this helps distill all the information currently housed in comments on the accepted answer.

Remark: If hp is not set as a factor, ggplot returns:

Answer 2

this modified code should work

p = ggplot(mydataf, aes(x = foo)) + 
    geom_bar(aes(y = (..count..)/sum(..count..))) + 
    scale_y_continuous(formatter = 'percent')

if your data has NAs and you dont want them to be included in the plot, pass na.omit(mydataf) as the argument to ggplot.

hope this helps.

Answer 3

Note that if your variable is continuous, you will have to use geom_histogram(), as the function will group the variable by "bins".

df <- data.frame(V1 = rnorm(100))

ggplot(df, aes(x = V1)) +  
  geom_histogram(aes(y = (..count..)/sum(..count..))) 

# if you use geom_bar(), with factor(V1), each value of V1 will be treated as a
# different category. In this case this does not make sense, as the variable is 
# really continuous. With the hp variable of the mtcars (see previous answer), it 
# worked well since hp was not really continuous (check unique(mtcars$hp)), and one 
# can want to see each value of this variable, and not to group it in bins.
ggplot(df, aes(x = factor(V1))) +  
  geom_bar(aes(y = (..count..)/sum(..count..))) 

Answer 4

With ggplot2 version 2.1.0 it is

+ scale_y_continuous(labels = scales::percent)

Answer 5

If you want percentage labels but actual Ns on the y axis, try this:

    library(scales)
perbar=function(xx){
      q=ggplot(data=data.frame(xx),aes(x=xx))+
      geom_bar(aes(y = (..count..)),fill="orange")
       q=q+    geom_text(aes(y = (..count..),label = scales::percent((..count..)/sum(..count..))), stat="bin",colour="darkgreen") 
      q
    }
    perbar(mtcars$disp)

Answer 6

As of March 2017, with ggplot2 2.2.1 I think the best solution is explained in Hadley Wickham's R for data science book:

ggplot(mydataf) + stat_count(mapping = aes(x=foo, y=..prop.., group=1))

stat_count computes two variables: count is used by default, but you can choose to use prop which shows proportions.