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How to Make a Custom Stacked Area Chart in R

You could use a package, but then you couldn’t customize every single element, and where’s the fun in that?

Stacked area charts are a standard chart type that shows how a categorical distribution changes over time. There are packages that can do most of the work for you, but for a recent chart I found myself wanting more control over how the chart was drawn, which led me to drawing from scratch.

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About the Author

Nathan Yau is a statistician who works primarily with visualization. He earned his PhD in statistics from UCLA, is the author of two best-selling books — Data Points and Visualize This — and runs FlowingData. Introvert. Likes food. Likes beer.