To give you an opportunity to continue practicing your R skills between now and the next workshop session, we have provided a new dataset for you to use, along with some practice problems.

Feel free to refer back to the code you wrote during the first workshop session. It’s very common (and encouraged!) to recycle and modify code you and others have written.

Dataset Description

msleep is a dataset that’s available in R as part of the ggplot2 pacakge, similar to the complete_old dataset we have been using from the ratdat package. The msleep dataset has information about different species of mammals and their sleep habits.

Write and execute the following code to read about where the dataset came from and what the variables are.

?msleep

Make a Scatter Plot

  1. Create a scatter plot from the data that places brainwt (brain weight) on the x-axis and sleep_total on the y-axis.
  2. Specify that the color of the points should vary based on the variable vore, which indicates the type of diet the animal has.
  3. Change the transparency of the points to 0.8.
  4. Transform the x-axis so it has a log10 scale using the scale_x_log10 function.

Reminders!
- geom_point is the function used to tell ggplot2 to make a scatter plot
- alpha = is how we specify transparency

Your code and the scatter plot you created should look similar to the following:

ggplot(data = msleep,
       aes(x = brainwt,
           y = sleep_total,
           color = vore)) +
  geom_point(alpha = 0.8) +
  scale_x_log10()

Make a Boxplot

  1. Create a boxplot from the data that uses vore (diet) as the x variable and awake (time awake in hours) as the y variable.
  2. Specify that the boxes should be filled with color based on the variable vore (diet)
  3. Optional Bonus: You can change the fill color of the boxes in a similar way to how we changed the color scale during the workshop. We used scale_viridis_d to change the color scale during the workshop. There is a similar function called scale_fill_viridis_d that works very similarly but operates on the fill variable instead.

Reminder!
- fill = is how we specify fill color

Your code and the boxplot you created should look similar to the following:

ggplot(data = msleep,
       aes(x = vore,
           y = awake,
           fill = vore)) +
  geom_boxplot() +
  scale_fill_viridis_d()

Reflections

  1. What was the most challenging aspect of this week’s workshop? Were you able to overcome it? If not, what assistance do you need to continue working through it?
  2. What was the most rewarding aspect of this week’s workshop?