Learning from and improving upon ggplotly conversions

Basic intro to geom_sf()

For a quick demonstration of geom_sf(), I’m using albersusa to access the laea projected boundaries of the United States as a simple features (sf) data structure, but sf also makes it easy to read various file formats and even convert various spatial objects to sf. There are also a bunch of other R packages that, like albersusa, make it easy to query geo-spatial data as an sf data. The “Reverse dependencies” section of sf’s CRAN page is a good place to discover them, but just to name a few: tidycensus, rnaturalearth, and mapsapi. One awesome consequence of using sf is that, since the data structure contains all the geo-spatial information, both plot() and geom_sf() just work^TM.

# to replicate these examples, you currently need the dev version
# devtools::install_github('ropensci/plotly')
# devtools::install_github('hrbrmstr/albersusa')
library(plotly)
library(sf)
library(albersusa)

us_laea <- usa_sf("laea")
p <- ggplot(us_laea) + geom_sf()
ggplotly(p)

The most brilliant thing about sf is that it stores geo-spatial structures in a special list-column of a data frame. This allows each row to represent the real unit of observation/interest – whether be a polygon, multi-polygon, point, line, or even a collection of these features – and as a result, supports workflows that leverage tidy-data principles³.

In our case, the us_laea data contains 51 rows (50 states + DC), and the geometry column tracks info about the geo-spatial objects:

library(dplyr)
select(us_laea, name, pop_2014, geometry)

Simple feature collection with 51 features and 2 fields
geometry type:  MULTIPOLYGON
dimension:      XY
bbox:           xmin: -2100000 ymin: -2500000 xmax: 2516374 ymax: 732103.3
epsg (SRID):    NA
proj4string:    +proj=laea +lat_0=45 +lon_0=-100 +x_0=0 +y_0=0 +a=6370997 +b=6370997 +units=m +no_defs
First 10 features:
                   name pop_2014                       geometry
1               Arizona  6731484 MULTIPOLYGON (((-1111066 -8...
2              Arkansas  2966369 MULTIPOLYGON (((557903.1 -1...
3            California 38802500 MULTIPOLYGON (((-1853480 -9...
4              Colorado  5355866 MULTIPOLYGON (((-613452.9 -...
5           Connecticut  3596677 MULTIPOLYGON (((2226838 519...
6  District of Columbia   658893 MULTIPOLYGON (((1960720 -41...
7               Georgia 10097343 MULTIPOLYGON (((1379893 -98...
8              Illinois 12880580 MULTIPOLYGON (((868942.5 -2...
9               Indiana  6596855 MULTIPOLYGON (((1279733 -39...
10            Louisiana  4649676 MULTIPOLYGON (((1080885 -16...

Compared to older workflows (e.g., fortify() + geom_polygon()), this is a way more convenient and intuitive data structure (especially if your real unit of interest is the state). Moreover, sf tracks additional information about the coordinate system and bounding box which ensures your aspect ratios are always correct and also makes it easy transform and simplify those features (more on this later). It’s worth noting that sf is still very new, and improvements are constantly being made – to keep updated, check out the r-spatial blog.

Tools for improving upon ggplotly() conversions

Yes, ggplotly() converts the map ‘correctly’, but it does take a while to print, and for some reason, no tooltip appears when hovering over the map. To investigate why, lets examine the JSON that plotly sends along to plotly.js to render the map. This can be done via the plotly_json() function, which is useful for seeing how any R plotly object is serialized as JSON. This JSON represents what we call a figure, which is comprised of numerous components – the most important of which are: layout (for controlling axes, labels, titles, etc) and data (a collection of traces, each of which defines a mapping from data to visuals).⁴

# prints an interactive htmlwidget if you have listviewer
# install.packages('listviewer')
plotly_json(p)

Inspecting the data component, we see that the map contains two 'scatter' traces, both with a mode of 'lines'. The first trace is the graticule behind the states and the second trace contains the state outlines which contain over 50,000+ x/y (i.e., lat/lon) positions! This is certainly not the most efficient way to create such a map and there are several ways we could improve upon it without abandoning the comfort of geom_sf().⁵ Before we dive into those improvements, lets first consider what happens when plotly generates a plot.

Whether you’re printing the result of ggplotly(), plot_ly(), or generally any R htmlwidget, there are two main steps that occur: a build (i.e. compile) and render step. Roughly speaking, the build step translates R code to an R list. That list is then serialized as JSON (via jsonlite::toJSON()) and should match a JSON specification (i.e. schema) defined by the JavaScript library (which uses the JSON to render the widget).

If you’ve ever found ggplotly() slow to print, chances are, the bulk of the time is spent building the R list and sending the JSON to plotly.js. For many htmlwidgets, the build time is negligible, but for more complex widgets like plotly, a lot of things need to happen, especially for ggplotly() since we call ggplot2::ggplot_build(), then crawl and map that data structure to plotly.js. In a shiny app, both the build and render stages are required on initial load, but the new plotlyProxy() interface provides a way to ‘cache’ expensive build (and render!) operation and update a graph by modifying just specific components of the figure (via plotly.js functions). Outside of a ‘reactive context’ like shiny, you could use htmlwidgets::saveWidget() to ‘cache’ the results of the build step to disk, send the file to someone else (or host it online somewhere), then only the render step is required to view the graph.

A quick and easy way to try and improve render performance is to use canvas-based rendering (instead of vector-based SVG) with toWebGL(p). Switching from vector to canvas is generally a good idea when dealing with >30,000 vectors, but in this case, we’re only dealing with a couple hundred vector paths, so switching from vector to canvas for our map won’t significantly improve rendering performance, and in fact, we’ll lose some nice SVG exclusive features (the plotly.js team is getting close to eliminating these limitations!). Instead, what we could (and should!) do is reduce the amount of points along to each path (technically speaking, we’ll reduce the complexity of the SVG d attribute).

Thankfully, the sf package provides st_simplify() function that may be used to simplify polygons while still preserving their shape. A bit of trial and error is involved, but the idea is that by increasing the value of the dTolerance argument, you’ll decrease the number of points required to draw the spatial features. For fun, before simplifying, lets leverage some more sf awesomeness, st_transform(). This function allows us to transform our features to any projection via the proj4 standard. Here I’ll transform from laea to lcc, and in this case, a dTolerance of 10000 simplifies from roughly 50,000 to 2,500 points. On my machine, that cuts the build and render time in half and reduces the HTML/JSON file size from 1.7MB to 125.9KB.

library(sf)
us_lcc <- usa_sf("laea") %>%
  st_transform("+proj=lcc +lat_1=33 +lat_2=45 +lat_0=39 +lon_0=-96 +x_0=0 +y_0=0 +datum=NAD83 +units=m +no_defs") %>%
  st_simplify(TRUE, dTolerance = 10000)
  
plotly_json(ggplot(us_lcc) + geom_sf())

Now that we’ve simplified the borders, lets look into why there is no hover information. Since hoverinfo='text', plotly.js just shows the text attribute in the tooltip, but that attribute is blank! It’s blank because, by default, ggplotly() puts all aesthetic mapping information in the text field, but we haven’t actually used an aesthetic mapping here (geom_sf() is weird in that way – it is the only geom that doesn’t require any aesthetics)! We’ll eventually use aesthetic mappings with geom_sf() to create a choropleth map, but before we do, lets find out what the other trace attributes are doing (and find other relevant ones).

If you’re ever wondering what a particular attribute means (e.g., text, fill, fillcolor, hoveron, etc), you can look up the description online by going to https://plot.ly/r/reference/#[type]-[attr] for a specific trace [type] and attribute [attr] (e.g. https://plot.ly/r/reference/#scatter-fill). The online reference is nice, but I prefer to use the schema() function for a few reasons:

• schema() provides a bit more information than the online docs (e.g., value types, default values, acceptable ranges, etc).
• The interface makes it a bit easier to traverse and discover new attributes.
• You can be absolutely sure it matches the version used in the R package (the online docs might use a different – probably older – version).

schema()

Go ahead and have a look under “traces” -> “scatter” -> “attributes”. These are all the attributes that may be used to control the appearance and interactive properties of a scatter trace. I won’t bother going through descriptions (you can see those for yourself by expanding an attribute), but I will demonstrate how we can leverage the style() function to modify just the state border’s attributes (specifying traces=2 ensures these changes are only applies to the second trace).

gg <- ggplotly(ggplot(us_lcc) + geom_sf())
style(
  gg, traces = 2, 
  mode = "markers+lines",
  hoverinfo = "x+y", 
  fillcolor = "transparent",
  hoverlabel = list(bgcolor = "white")
)

Leveraging plotly’s interactive features

After that deep dive into how ggplotly() works under the hood, and tips for improving rendering performance, let’s explore some lesser known, yet powerful ggplotly() features. As a side note, anything that can be done via ggplotly(), you can also do via plot_ly() (but not necessarily the other way round!) – it just might be more effort to do so. And, sometimes this extra effort is worth it, because ggplotly() isn’t really designed to be re-sized without being re-printed (get in touch if you want to help us solve this and other big issues). In fact, a lot of times, I prototype plots with ggplotly(), then translate it plot_ly() when it’s time to put it into production.

p <- ggplot(us_lcc) + 
  geom_sf(aes(fill = pop_2014, text = paste("The state of <b>", name, "</b> had \n", pop_2010, "people in 2010")))
p %>%
  ggplotly(tooltip = "text") %>%
  style(hoverlabel = list(bgcolor = "white"), hoveron = "fill")

Animation

A choropleth map of the population in 2014 is not that interesting, so let’s grab some other data. Here I download physical activity and obesity ‘prevalence’ between 2001-2011 in every US county from the Global Health Data Exchange. then finding the mean rate for every combination of state and year:

url <- "http://ghdx.healthdata.org/sites/default/files/record-attached-files/IHME_USA_OBESITY_PHYSICAL_ACTIVITY_2001_2011.csv"

library(tidyr)
# reshape and create a column tracking the year
dat_clean <- readr::read_csv(url) %>%
  gather(year, value, matches("prevalence [0-9]+ \\(%\\)")) %>%
  mutate(year = stringr::str_extract(year, "[0-9]+")) 

# compute mean outcome for every combination of state/year/outcome
dat_state <- dat_clean %>%
  rename(name = State, outcome = Outcome) %>%
  group_by(name, year, outcome) %>%
  summarise(value = mean(value, na.rm = TRUE))

# attach our (simplified) state features to our summaries 
dat_sf <- dat_state %>%
  left_join(us_lcc) %>%
  st_as_sf() %>%
  mutate(txt = paste(name, year, "\n", outcome, scales::percent(value / 100)))
  
select(dat_sf, name, year, outcome, value, geometry)

Simple feature collection with 1683 features and 4 fields
geometry type:  GEOMETRY
dimension:      XY
bbox:           xmin: -2553435 ymin: -1777696 xmax: 2258071 ymax: 1407299
epsg (SRID):    NA
proj4string:    +proj=lcc +lat_1=33 +lat_2=45 +lat_0=39 +lon_0=-96 +x_0=0 +y_0=0 +ellps=GRS80 +towgs84=0,0,0,0,0,0,0 +units=m +no_defs
# A tibble: 1,683 x 5
# Groups:   name, year [561]
   name    year  outcome       value                       geometry
 1 Alabama 2001  Any PA         66.0 MULTIPOLYGON (((761196.5 -9...
 2 Alabama 2001  Obesity        34.5 MULTIPOLYGON (((761196.5 -9...
 3 Alabama 2001  Sufficient PA  42.7 MULTIPOLYGON (((761196.5 -9...
 4 Alabama 2002  Any PA         66.8 MULTIPOLYGON (((761196.5 -9...
 5 Alabama 2002  Obesity        35.4 MULTIPOLYGON (((761196.5 -9...
 6 Alabama 2002  Sufficient PA NaN   MULTIPOLYGON (((761196.5 -9...
 7 Alabama 2003  Any PA         67.5 MULTIPOLYGON (((761196.5 -9...
 8 Alabama 2003  Obesity        36.2 MULTIPOLYGON (((761196.5 -9...
 9 Alabama 2003  Sufficient PA  44.6 MULTIPOLYGON (((761196.5 -9...
10 Alabama 2004  Any PA         67.7 MULTIPOLYGON (((761196.5 -9...
# ... with 1,673 more rows

There’s a number of ways we could try to visualize how physical activity and/or obesity has evolved over the years. One way would be to create a small multiple display (one for every year via facet_wrap(~ year)), but it’s a bit less visual work to perceive differences via animation. Creating animations with ggplotly() is very similar to gganimate – we just add an aesthetic mapping of frame = year.

obesity <- filter(dat_sf, outcome == "Obesity")
p <- ggplot(obesity) + 
    geom_sf(aes(fill = value, frame = year, text = txt)) + 
    ggtitle("Obesity rates in the US over time") +
    ggthemes::theme_map()
plotly_json(p)

Having a look at the underlying JSON reveals a special frame component which adheres to the underlying plotly.js animation api. It turns out that the data supplied to each frame of the animation has a bunch of redundant information. Specifically, the x/y coordinates for the state boundaries are repeated on every frame – which we don’t really need to do in this case, so let’s remove that data before printing:

# ggplotly() won't (for good reason) "register" an animation
# until print time, so to acess/modify the frames component, 
# you'll need plotly_build() -- use this function when you 
# want to be *absolutely* sure you're accessing the full list/JSON
gg <- p %>%
  ggplotly(tooltip = "text") %>%
  style(hoveron = "fill") %>%
  plotly_build()

# remove x/y data from every trace
gg$x$frames <- lapply(
  gg$x$frames, function(f) { 
    f$data <- lapply(f$data, function(d) d[!names(d) %in% c("x", "y")])
    f 
  })
gg

Highlighting

In addition to animation, plotly has powerful framework for filtering, highlighting, and linking views without shiny. This framework leverages the SharedData class from crosstalk package where one essentially defines a “unit of interaction” using a column from the data to be visualized. In our case, we can set name (i.e, state) as the interaction unit, then when we trigger a selection (e.g., brush a time series of physical actively), the relevant graphical marks are highlighted in every view:

library(crosstalk)
dat_shared <- dat_sf %>%
  filter(!is.na(value)) %>%
  SharedData$new(~name, "A")

p <- ggplot(dat_shared) + 
  geom_line(aes(x = year, y = value, group = name)) + 
  facet_wrap(~outcome, scales = "free") +
  theme_bw()

lines <- p %>%
  ggplotly(tooltip = "name") %>%
  style(mode = "markers+lines") %>%
  layout(dragmode = "select") %>%
  highlight("plotly_selected")

# compute mean obesity for each state, define "state" as interaction unit (in group "A")
ob_mean <- obesity %>%
  group_by(name) %>%
  summarise(mean_obesity = mean(value)) %>%
  mutate(txt = paste(name, "mean \n obesity", scales::percent(mean_obesity / 100))) %>%
  SharedData$new(~name, "A")

map <- ggplot(ob_mean) + 
  geom_sf(aes(fill = mean_obesity, text = txt)) + 
  ggthemes::theme_map()

library(htmltools)
browsable(tagList(ggplotly(map, tooltip = "text"), lines))

For a gentle overview of the linking framework, checkout my webinar from when it was initially released. If you’re interested in understanding the full power of the linking framework, my 2 day plotly for R workshop is the best way to learn it effectively. I also offer this workshop as an on-site training course, so please get in touch if you have any interest!

Discussion

Compared to other interactive mapping approaches, using geom_sf() + ggplotly() has it’s pros and its cons. It terms of it’s ability to link multiple views, it seems to be the most advanced, but there are a number of other features you might want (e.g., dynamic zooming of different baselayers). I think a good number of these can be resolved by using sf with plot_mapbox() and better support for that should be coming soon, but it would also be nice to see leaflet officially support more of the highlighting features that plotly does.

As it turns out, plotly’s ‘highlighting’ framework can actually be used to do much more than just highlighting. It works by adding additional traces that reflect the selected data and the attributes of these trace(s) can be customized. When used in clever ways, that capability can be used to, for example, outline simple features on hover, or even click on a simple feature to label it:

Conclusion

I hope this post convinces folks that even when a ggplotly() conversion doesn’t quite work the way you want it to, we can still leverage the underlying plotly.js library to do powerful things quickly. My goal for the R package plotly has always been to make interactive web graphics practically useful for exploratory data analysis in R. If you’re interested in supporting a particular facet of this mission, please get in touch (it’s much easier for plotly to monetize plotly.js and dash, which is why R plotly development has dwindled recently).