Marking specific tiles in geom_tile() / geom_raster()

Question

Let\'s say I have a data.frame like this:

df <- matrix( rnorm(100), nrow = 10)
rownames(df) <- LETTERS[1:10]
molten <- melt(df)
molten$na <- FALS         


        

Answer 1

Here are two possible approaches:

In Example 1, I used ifelse and scale_size_manual to control whether a point is plotted in each cell.

In Example 2, I created a small auxiliary data.frame and used geom_rect to plot a rectangle instead of a dot. For convenience, I converted Var2 to factor. In ggplot2, each step along a discrete/factor axis is length 1.0. This allows easy computation of the values for geom_rect.

# Using ggplot2 version 0.9.2.1
library(ggplot2)

# Test dataset from original post has been assigned to 'molten'.

molten$Var2 = factor(molten$Var2)

# Example 1.
p1 = ggplot(data=molten, aes(x=Var1, y=Var2, fill=value)) +
     geom_raster() +
     scale_fill_gradient2(low="blue", high="red", na.value="black", name="") +
     geom_point(aes(size=ifelse(na, "dot", "no_dot"))) +
     scale_size_manual(values=c(dot=6, no_dot=NA), guide="none") +
     labs(title="Example 1")

ggsave(plot=p1, filename="plot_1.png", height=3, width=3.5) 

# Example 2.
# Create auxiliary data.frame.
frames = molten[molten$na, c("Var1", "Var2")]
frames$Var1 = as.integer(frames$Var1)
frames$Var2 = as.integer(frames$Var2)

p2 = ggplot(data=molten) +
     geom_raster(aes(x=Var1, y=Var2, fill=value)) +
     scale_fill_gradient2(low="blue", high="red", na.value="black", name="") +
     geom_rect(data=frames, size=1, fill=NA, colour="black",
       aes(xmin=Var1 - 0.5, xmax=Var1 + 0.5, ymin=Var2 - 0.5, ymax=Var2 + 0.5)) +
     labs(title="Example 2")

ggsave(plot=p2, filename="plot_2.png", height=3, width=3.5) 

Answer 2

As @joran suggested in the comments, you can pass a subset of the data to a particular layer.

Using your example data

g <- ggplot( molten ) +
  geom_raster( aes( x = Var1, y = Var2, fill = value )  ) + 
  scale_fill_gradient2( low = "blue", high = "red", na.value="black", name = "" ) +
  geom_point(data = molten[molten$na,], aes( x = Var1, y = Var2, size= as.numeric(na) ) )


g

If you wanted the legend to say something about what the dots signify

 g <- ggplot( molten ) +
  geom_raster( aes( x = Var1, y = Var2, fill = value )  ) + 
  scale_fill_gradient2( low = "blue", high = "red", na.value="black", name = "" ) +
  geom_point(data = molten[molten$na,], aes( x = Var1, y = Var2, colour = 'black' )) +
  scale_colour_manual(name = 'Ooh look', values = 'black', labels = 'Something cool')