Inserting Custom Vertical/Horizontal Lines AlgebraOfGraphics.jl

In this tutorial, we’ll cover how to insert custom vertical and horizontal lines in AoG.jl plots**.

To begin, like before, let’s load AoG.jl, data wrangling libraries and the DataFrame we’ve used previously:

using PharmaDatasets
using DataFramesMeta

df = dataset("demographics_1")
first(df, 5)

5×6 DataFrame

Row	ID	AGE	WEIGHT	SCR	ISMALE	eGFR
	Int64	Float64	Float64	Float64	Int64	Float64
1	1	34.823	38.212	1.1129	0	42.635
2	2	32.765	74.838	0.8846	1	126.0
3	3	35.974	37.303	1.1004	1	48.981
4	4	38.206	32.969	1.1972	1	38.934
5	5	33.559	47.139	1.5924	0	37.198

And now load AoG.jl along with CairoMakie.jl:

using CairoMakie
using AlgebraOfGraphics

1 📏 Vertical and Horizontal Lines

AoG.jl does have specific plotting recipes for horizontal or vertical lines.

First, let’s create a simple plot with AoG.jl:

plt = data(df) * mapping(:AGE, :eGFR) * visual(Scatter);

As we can see, here is our plt drawn with AoG.jl:

draw(plt)

Now suppose you would want to insert custom horizontal lines between :eGFR values of 30 and 100 to draw attention to observations inside and outside this range.

We can do this with AoG.jl’s HLines and VLines:

HLines

plt_hlines = mapping([30, 100]) * visual(HLines);

draw(plt + plt_hlines)

Here we are passing the first and only positional argument to mapping since HLines only takes a single positional argument as a vector of the ys values that we want to draw a horizontal line at.

VLines

Notice that the procedure to have vertical lines is the same, but with VLines instead:

plt_vlines = mapping([30, 100]) * visual(VLines);

draw(plt + plt_vlines)

2 🎨 Customizing VLines and HLines

By default, VLines and HLines will use the colors from AoG.jl’s default theme palette (or any other custom palette you’ve set as the theme’s default).

Suppose you’ll want to customize the lines being drawn by VLines and HLines. You can use the same keyword arguments as Lines plotting type:

Tip

We use the plotting type in AoG.jl (Lines) but to get the attributes we call Makie.jl’s plotting function (lines).

help_attributes(lines)

Available attributes for `MakieCore.Lines` are: 

alpha clip_planes color colormap colorrange colorscale cycle depth_shift highclip inspectable inspector_clear inspector_hover inspector_label joinstyle linecap linestyle linewidth lowclip miter_limit nan_color overdraw space ssao transparency visible

So let’s create the previous horizontal lines between :eGFR values of 30 and 100, but with linewidth set to 3, linestyle to :dash and color being :red with alpha 0.7:

draw(
    plt + (
        mapping([30, 100]) *
        visual(HLines; linewidth = 3, color = (:red, 0.5), linestyle = :dash)
    ),
)

3 💄 Filling regions with VSpan and HSpan

You can also fill vertical or horizontal regions of your plots with VSpan and HSpan, respectively.

The logic is similar as VLines and HLines. The first and second positional arguments inside the mapping are ys_low/xs_low and ys_high/xs_high, both being a vector of length-1 to specify the minimal or maximal lower bounds of either the horizontal or vertical regions.

Let’s fill the range that we’ve depicted in our last plot, between :eGFR values of 30 and 100:

HSpan

plt_hspan = mapping([30], [100]) * visual(HSpan);

draw(plt + plt_hspan)

VSpan

Of course, it also works for vertical spans:

plt_vspan = mapping([30], [100]) * visual(VSpan);

draw(plt + plt_vspan)

Customization

We can also customize HSpan and VSpan if we want to:

draw(plt + (mapping([30], [100]) * visual(HSpan; color = (:orange, 0.5))))

4 Conclusion

That’s it for our tutorial on custom horizontal and vertical lines in AoG.jl using visual([H|V]Lines).