Plot Interactive High Charts using R

Highcharts is another way to represent the data manually. Highcharts is a charting library which is written in pure JavaScript language. Basically it provides an easy way of adding interactive charts to your website or web application. Highcharts is a product that was created by the Norway-based company, Highsoft.

Currently it supports many types of charts like line, spline, area, areaspline, column, bar, pie, scatter, and so on. 

Advantage:

·       ·        Highcharts have a lots of chart types with same format, style, flavor

·        You can create or modify themes to customize the charts beautifully.

·        Lots of function like tooltips, titles, credits, legends, etc.

·        Provide various chart type with same style scatters, bubble, line, time series, bar graphs, and Heatmaps etc.

·        Piping Style

·        Configure your charts in different ways using themes. There are inbuilt     themes provide by highcharter package like economist, financial times, google,   538  among others.

·        Plugins: motion, drag points,  fontawesome, url-pattern, annotations.

Disadvantage:

• ·        Faceting is not possible in High charts
• ·        It uses standard evaluation plot(data$x, data$y) instead something like plot(data, ~x, ~y).

In this post we are going to plot interactive combo high charts in R using rcharts package. In this tutorial we are also using shiny package of R. This package is mostly used to create web application using R language.

As you know in shiny package we have two files (ui.R and server.R). Firstly we try to create a user interface file. 

ui.R

library(shiny) ## Create Data Tokyo  <-  c(7.0, 6.9, 9.5, 14.5, 18.2, 21.5, 25.2, 26.5, 23.3, 18.3, 13.9, 9.6) NewYork  <-  c(-0.2, 0.8, 5.7, 11.3, 17.0, 22.0, 24.8, 24.1, 20.1, 14.1, 8.6, 2.5) Berlin  <-  c(-0.9, 0.6, 3.5, 8.4, 13.5, 17.0, 18.6, 17.9, 14.3, 9.0, 3.9, 1.0) London  <-  c(3.9, 4.2, 5.7, 8.5, 11.9, 15.2, 17.0, 16.6, 14.2, 10.3, 6.6, 4.8) ## Define UI for application that draws a Combo Graph shinyUI(fluidPage(     # Application title   titlePanel("Monthly Average Temperature"),       # Show a plot     mainPanel(        showOutput("Graph", "Highcharts") )))

After created a ui.R script, now come to server.R file.

server.R

library(shiny) library(highcharter) # Define server logic required to draw a Combo graph shinyServer(function(input, output) { # High Chart code for Plotting the Combo Graph output$Graph <- renderChart({     h1 <- Highcharts()    # Tokyo Line Graph     h1$series(data = Tokyo, type='spline', name='Tokyo')    # New York Line Graph     h1$series(data = NewYork, type='spline', name='New York')   # Berlin Line Graph     h1$series(data = Berlin, type='spline', name='Berlin')   # London column Graph     h1$series(data = London, type='column', name='London')    # Set Legend Layout     h1$legend(layout='vertical',align='right',verticaAlign='top',borderWidth=0)    # Add xAxis label in a graph     h1$xAxis(categories=c('Jan', 'Feb', 'Mar', 'Apr', 'May', 'Jun', 'Jul', 'Aug', 'Sep', 'Oct', 'Nov', 'Dec'))     h1$set(dom='Graph')     h1   })   })

There are lots of things and options to do with high charts. You can refer this link Highcharts options to get more information about function in Highcharts.

When you save both file and click on RunApp button, you will get same output as you see in below image.

When you will go to any point then it will show to the information regarding to that point. You can also visit http://www.highcharts.com/demo/  website to take demo for interactive high charts. 


Highcharts gives superb web design with high adaptability, and the highcharter package permits R clients to take full advantage of them. In case you're keen on discovering more about the usefulness of the package, I very prescribe perusing the highcharter package homepage page which contains an different variety of Highcharts, Highstock and Highmaps plots alongside test code to recreate them.