ggplot2 2.1.0

I’m very pleased to announce the release of ggplot2 2.1.0, scales 0.4.0, and gtable 0.2.0. These are set of relatively minor updates that fix a whole bunch of little problems that crept in during the last big update. The most important changes are described below.

1. When mapping an aesthetic to a constant the default guide title is the name of the aesthetic (i.e. “colour”), not the value (i.e. “loess”). This is a really handy technique for labelling individual layers:

   ggplot(mpg, aes(displ, 1 / hwy)) +
     geom_point() + 
     geom_smooth(method = lm, aes(colour = "lm"), se = FALSE) + 
     geom_smooth(aes(colour = "loess"), se = FALSE)

2. stat_bin() (which powers geom_histogram() and geom_freqpoly()), has been overhauled to use the same algorithm as ggvis. This has considerably better parameters and defaults thanks to the work of Randall Pruim. Changes include:
   • Better arguments and a better algorithm for determining the origin. You can now specify either boundary (i.e. the position of the left or right side) or the center of a bin. origin has been deprecated in favour of these arguments.
   • drop is deprecated in favour of pad, which adds extra 0-count bins at either end, as is needed for frequency polygons. geom_histogram() defaults to pad = FALSE which considerably improves the default limits for the histogram, especially when the bins are big.
   • The default algorithm does a (somewhat) better job at picking nice widths and origins across a wider range of input data.

   You can see the impact of these changes on the following two histograms:

   ggplot(diamonds, aes(carat)) + 
     geom_histogram(binwidth = 1)    
   ggplot(diamonds, aes(carat)) + 
     geom_histogram(binwidth = 1, boundary = 0)

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3. All layer functions (geom_*() + stat_*()) functions now have a consistent argument order: data, mapping, then geom/stat/position, then ..., then layer specific arguments, …read more

   Source:: r-bloggers.com