How to create a complex bubble chart in R

Question

I have a data set like this (simplified for illustration purposes):

zz <- textConnection("Company   Market.Cap  Institutions.Own    Price.Earnings  Industry
 ExxonMobil 405.69  50% 9.3 Energy
 Citigroup  156.23  67% 18.45   Banking
 Pfizer 212.51  73% 20.91   Pharma
 JPMorgan   193.1   75% 9.12    Banking
 ")
Companies <- read.table(zz, header= TRUE)
close(zz)

I would like to create a bubble chart (well, something like a bubble chart) with the following properties:

• each bubble is a company, with the size of the bubble tied to market cap,
• the color of the bubble tied to industry,
• with the x-axis having two categories, Industries.Own and Price.Earnings,
• and the y-axis being a 1-10 scale, each company's values being normalized to that scale. (I could of course do the normalization outside R but I believe R makes that possible.)

To be clear, each company will appear in each column of the result, for example ExxonMobil will be near the bottom of both the Institutions.Own column and the Price.Earnings column; ideally, the name of the company would appear in or next to both of its bubbles.

Answer 1

I think this touches on all of your points. Note - your Institutions.Own is read in as a factor because of the %...I simply deleted that for ease of time...you'll need to address that somewhere. Once that is done, I would use ggplot and map your different aesthetics accordingly. You can fiddle with the axes titles et al if you need.

#Requisite packages
library(ggplot2)
library(reshape2)
#Define function, adjust this as necessary
rescaler <- function(x) 10 * (x-min(x)) / (max(x)-min(x))
#Rescale your two variables
Companies$Inst.Scales <- with(Companies, rescaler(Institutions.Own))
Companies$Price.Scales <- with(Companies, rescaler(Price.Earnings))
#Melt into long format
Companies.m <- melt(Companies, measure.vars = c("Inst.Scales", "Price.Scales"))
#Plotting code
ggplot(Companies.m, aes(x = variable, y = value, label = Company)) +
  geom_point(aes(size = Market.Cap, colour = Industry)) + 
  geom_text(hjust = 1, size = 3) +
  scale_size(range = c(4,8)) +
  theme_bw()

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