Customize background to highlight ranges of data in ggplot
ggplot2, r
Solution
You can add the "bars" with `geom_rect()` and setting `ymin` and `ymax` values to `-Inf` and `Inf`. But according to @sc_evens answer to this question you have to move `data` and `aes()` to `geom_point()` and leave `ggplot()` empty to ensure that `alpha=` of `geom_rect()` works as expected.
ggplot()+
geom_point(data=df,aes(x=y*abs(x),y=y),alpha=.2,size=5) +
geom_rect(aes(xmin=-0.1,xmax=0.1,ymin=-Inf,ymax=Inf),alpha=0.1,fill="green")+
geom_rect(aes(xmin=-0.25,xmax=-0.1,ymin=-Inf,ymax=Inf),alpha=0.1,fill="orange")+
geom_rect(aes(xmin=0.1,xmax=0.25,ymin=-Inf,ymax=Inf),alpha=0.2,fill="orange")+
theme_bw() +
coord_cartesian(xlim = c(-.5,.5),ylim=c(-1,1))
Problem
I want to set background colors in my ggplot to highlight ranges of data. Particularly, I want to highlight `[-0.1,0.1]` with, say, green,`[-0.25,-0.1)` and `(0.1,0.25]` with orange. In other words, what I need are bars with some alpha-transparency whose y-limits are the plot's y range, and x-limits are set by me. Ideally, I would want something that would not be sensitive to `coord_cartesian(...)` (as setting `vline(...,size = X)` would). Additionally, it would be nice to have something independent from any data, and based solely on plot coordinates. I tried `geom_segment`, but I could not figure it our how to set a width that would work. ``` library(ggplot2) x <- c(seq(-1, 1, by = .001)) y <- rnorm(length(x)) df <- as.data.frame(x=x,y=y) ggplot(df,aes(x,y)) + geom_point(aes(y*abs(x)),alpha=.2,size=5) + theme_bw() + coord_cartesian(xlim = c(-.5,.5),ylim=c(-1,1)) ```