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

Here is a workaround for faceted data. (The accepted answer by @Andrew does not work in this case.) The idea is to calculate the percentage value using dplyr and then to use geom_col to create the plot.

library(ggplot2)
library(scales)
library(magrittr)
library(dplyr)

binwidth <- 30

mtcars.stats <- mtcars %>%
  group_by(cyl) %>%
  mutate(bin = cut(hp, breaks=seq(0,400, binwidth), 
               labels= seq(0+binwidth,400, binwidth)-(binwidth/2)),
         n = n()) %>%
  group_by(cyl, bin) %>%
  summarise(p = n()/n[1]) %>%
  ungroup() %>%
  mutate(bin = as.numeric(as.character(bin)))

ggplot(mtcars.stats, aes(x = bin, y= p)) +  
  geom_col() + 
  scale_y_continuous(labels = percent) +
  facet_grid(cyl~.)

This is the plot:

Answer 2

If you want percentages on the y-axis and labeled on the bars:

library(ggplot2)
library(scales)
ggplot(mtcars, aes(x = as.factor(am))) +
  geom_bar(aes(y = (..count..)/sum(..count..))) +
  geom_text(aes(y = ((..count..)/sum(..count..)), label = scales::percent((..count..)/sum(..count..))), stat = "count", vjust = -0.25) +
  scale_y_continuous(labels = percent) +
  labs(title = "Manual vs. Automatic Frequency", y = "Percent", x = "Automatic Transmission")

When adding the bar labels, you may wish to omit the y-axis for a cleaner chart, by adding to the end:

  theme(
        axis.text.y=element_blank(), axis.ticks=element_blank(),
        axis.title.y=element_blank()
  )