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I want to have a jitter violin coloured by sample ids but I get this weird plot

> str(long)
Classes ‘data.table’ and 'data.frame':  156 obs. of  3 variables:
 $ gene    : chr  "gene2" "gene3" "gene4" "gene1" ...
 $ variable: chr  "1016" "1016" "1016" "1016" ...
 $ value   : num  5.82 8.41 11.22 7.21 5.61 ...
 - attr(*, ".internal.selfref")=<externalptr> 
>

> p <- ggplot(long, aes(x=gene, y=value,colour=variable))
> p + geom_violin(width = 1.3) + geom_quasirandom(alpha = 0.2, width = 0.2)+ theme_classic()
There were 21 warnings (use warnings() to see them)

enter image description here

I can not figure out where I am doing something wrong that I get this instead of getting a proper violin plot by dots coloured with sample IDs

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  • $\begingroup$ What are the warnings()? $\endgroup$
    – gringer ♦
    Commented Jul 8, 2022 at 6:51
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    $\begingroup$ I see 17 different variables and 4 genes on the plot this are 153 values for 1 measurement for each sample and gene but your data.frame has only 156 rows. So at most you have 3 repeated measures for the same gene and variable. You can't make a (meaningful) boxplot of 1 value, so it is expected that very few boxplots can be drawn $\endgroup$
    – llrs
    Commented Jul 8, 2022 at 9:50

1 Answer 1

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What happens if you group by gene?

> long |>
  ggplot() +
  aes(x=gene, y=value, colour=variable, group=gene) +
  geom_violin(width = 1.3) +
  geom_quasirandom(alpha = 0.2, width = 0.2) +
  theme_classic()

@llrs raised an insightful point in their comment. There's a good chance that the "weird plot" that you see is a side effect of trying to display individual "grouped-by-variable" boxplots that have too little data. Without knowing what you would like the boxplot to look like, it's hard to create something to improve the presentation.

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