How to create a boxplot using plotly in R?

Recipe Objective

Box-plots are also known as box-whisker plots. They are a special type of plot which showcases complex numerical data in a compact manner. It is more informative than a strip chart as it also displays the interquartile range, median and min-max range. It is mainly used to find outliers in the dataset. ​

In this recipe we are going to use Plotly package to plot the required box plot. Plotly package provides an interface to the plotly javascript library allowing us to create interactive web-based graphics entrirely in R. Plots created by plotly works in multiple format such as: ​

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Plotly has been actively developed and supported by it's community. ​

This recipe demonstrates how to plot a box plot in R using plotly package. ​

STEP 1: Loading required library and dataset

Dataset description: It is the basic data about the customers going to the supermarket mall. The variables that we are interested in: Annual.Income (which is in 1000s) , Spending Score and Age

# Data manipulation package library(dplyr) library(tidyverse) # reading a dataset customer_seg = read.csv('R_131_Mall_Customers.csv') # selecting the required variables using the select() function customer_seg_var = select(customer_seg, Age, Annual.Income..k..,Spending.Score..1.100.) # summary of the selected variables glimpse(customer_seg_var)

Observations: 200
Variables: 3
$ Age                     19, 21, 20, 23, 31, 22, 35, 23, 64, 30, 67, 35…
$ Annual.Income..k..      15, 15, 16, 16, 17, 17, 18, 18, 19, 19, 19, 19…
$ Spending.Score..1.100.  39, 81, 6, 77, 40, 76, 6, 94, 3, 72, 14, 99, 1…

STEP 2: Plotting a box plot using Plotly

We use the plot_ly() function to plot a box plot between of Annual Income based on Gender.

Syntax: plot_ly( data = , x = , y = , type = "box")

Where:

1. x = variable to be plotted in x axis
2. y = variable to be plotted in y axis
3. data = dataframe to be used
4. type = type of the chart

Note:

1. The %>% sign in the syntax earlier makes the code more readable and enables R to read further code without breaking it.
2. We also use layout() function to give a title to the graph

fig <- plot_ly(x = ~Gender, y = ~Annual.Income..k.., data = customer_seg, type = "box") %>% layout(title = 'Box Plot using Plotly') embed_notebook(fig) ​