Use ggplot2 to plot time series data

Question

I am doing a project which requires to use ggplot2 to plot time series data. This is the data set I am using:

This is what I've done now:

library(ggplot2)
library(lubridate)
eur$Date <- as.Date(eur$Date)
ggplot(eur, aes(Date, EUR)) + geom_line()

And I got this very weird plot. Can someone help me fix the problem?

Answer 1

Edit - if your data is of class timeseries(ts) then you can use ggfortify's autoplot function and it will take care of the conversion for you.

library(ggfortify) 
library (ggplot2)
ggfortify::autoplot(df) 

If your data is not timeseries, then your date column may be factor or character.

If it is character convert with as.Date(foo)

If it is a factor then see below

   #create the data 
data <- data.frame(
i = c(6L, 7L, 8L, 9L, 10L, 11L, 12L, 13L, 14L, 15L, 16L, 17L),
Date = c("2000-01-03", "2000-01-04", "2000-01-05", "2000-01-06",
"2000-01-07", "2000-01-10", "2000-01-11", "2000-01-12",
"2000-01-13", "2000-01-14", "2000-01-18", "2000-01-19"),
EUR = c(1.0155, 1.0309, 1.0335, 1.0324, 1.0294, 1.0252, 1.0322,
1.0281, 1.027, 1.0128, 1.0121, 1.0115)
)

#check the data
str(data)

# convert date column to Date as it is currently a **factor**
data$Date <- as.Date(as.character(data$Date))

#basic plot
library(ggplot2)
ggplot(data,aes(Date, EUR)) + geom_line() + geom_point()

## plot can be tidied up further using lubridate/scales packages 

#sessionInfo() 
# R version 3.4.0 (2017-04-21)
# Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)
# Running under: Windows 7 x64 (build 7601) Service Pack 1
# 
# Matrix products: default
# 
# locale:
#   [1] LC_COLLATE=English_United Kingdom.1252  LC_CTYPE=English_United Kingdom.1252   
# [3] LC_MONETARY=English_United Kingdom.1252 LC_NUMERIC=C                           
# [5] LC_TIME=English_United Kingdom.1252    
# 
# attached base packages:
#   [1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     
# 
# other attached packages:
#   [1] ggplot2_2.2.1
# 
# loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
#   [1] labeling_0.3     colorspace_1.3-2 scales_0.4.1     compiler_3.4.0   lazyeval_0.2.0  
# [6] plyr_1.8.4       tools_3.4.0      gtable_0.2.0     tibble_1.3.3     Rcpp_0.12.11    
# [11] grid_3.4.0       rlang_0.1.1      munsell_0.4.3   
# > 

Answer 2

well you need to scale your data. Can you elaborate on your explanation of what the data looks likes. This formatting might help you. I need better understanding of data though

library(ggplot2)
library(lubridate)  
ggplot( aes(Date, EUR)) + geom_line() +
scale_x_date(format = "%b-%Y") + xlab("") + ylab("")

Answer 3

@Niranja Gd's answer will not work, because format is no argument in scale_x_date.

The following approach should do the job:

df$Date <- as.Date(df$Date)

library(ggplot2)

ggplot(df, aes(Date, EUR)) + geom_line() +
  scale_x_date(date_labels = "%d-%b")