Create a bivariate color gradient legend using lattice for an spplot overlaying polygons with alpha

问题

I've created a map by overlaying polygons using spplot and with the alpha value of the fill set to 10/255 so that areas with more polygons overlapping have a more saturated color. The polygons are set to two different colors (blue and red) based on a binary variable in the attribute table. Thus, while the color saturation depends on the number of polygons overlapping, the color depends on the ratio of the blue and red classes of polygons.

There is, of course, no easy built-in legend for this so I need to create one from scratch. There is a nice solution to this in base graphics found here. I also came up with a not-so-good hack to do this in ggplot based on this post from kohske. A similar question was posted here and I did my best to give some solutions, but couldn't really come up with a solid answer. Now I need to do the same for myself, but I specifically would like to use R and also use grid graphics.

This is the ggplot hack I came up with

Variable_A <- 100 # max of variable
Variable_B <- 100

x <- melt(outer(1:Variable_A, 1:Variable_B)) # set up the data frame to plot from

p <- ggplot(x) + theme_classic() + scale_alpha(range=c(0,0.5), guide="none") +
  geom_tile(aes(x=Var1, y=Var2, fill="Variable_A", col.regions="red", alpha=Var1)) +
  geom_tile(aes(x=Var1, y=Var2, fill="Variable_B", col.regions="blue", alpha=Var2)) +
  scale_x_continuous(limits = c(0, Variable_A), expand = c(0, 0)) +
  scale_y_continuous(limits = c(0, Variable_B), expand = c(0, 0)) +
  xlab("Variable_A") + ylab("Variable_B") +
  guides(fill=FALSE)
p

Which gives this:

This doesn't work for my purposes for two reasons. 1) Because the alpha value varies, the second color plotted (blue in this case) overwhelms the first one as the alpha values get higher. The correct legend should have blue and red mixed evenly along the 1:1 diagonal. In addition, the colors don't really properly correspond to the map colors. 2) I don't know how to overlay a ggplot object on the lattice map created with spplot. I tried to create a grob using ggplotGrob(p), but still couldn't figure out how to add the grob to the spplot map.

The ideal solution would be to create a similar figure using lattice graphics. I think that using tiles is probably the right solution, but what would be best is to have the alpha values stay constant and vary the number of tiles plotted going from left to right (for red) and bottom to top (for blue). Thus, the colors and saturation should properly match the map (I think...).

Any help is much appreciated!

回答1:

How about mapping the angle to color, and alpha to the sum of the two variables -- does this do what you want?

d <- expand.grid(x=1:100, y=1:100)

ggplot(d, aes(x, y, fill=atan(y/x), alpha=x+y)) + 
  geom_tile() + 
  scale_fill_gradient(high="red", low="blue")+
  theme(legend.position="none", panel.background=element_blank())

来源：https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26271433/create-a-bivariate-color-gradient-legend-using-lattice-for-an-spplot-overlaying

标签

ggplot2

alpha

lattice