plotly Package

Yo can create easily interactive graphics with the help of the plotly package.

> library(plotly)

Using plotly is free if you permit them to publish your plots on their website. Nevertheless, you have to create an account and register it in the R session.

A starting guide for using the plotly package in R can be found here.

> Sys.setenv("plotly_username"="YOUR_USERNAME")
> Sys.setenv("plotly_api_key"="YOUR_API_KEY")

Let's take our ggplot2 plot we have created in the previous section. Turning this into interactive graphic is very simple thanke to ggplotly() function.

> p <- autoplot.zoo(bmw_2014_xts, 
+                   main = "BMW OHLC plot with ggplot2",
+                   facets = NULL) + xlab("") +  facet_free()
> gg <- ggplotly(p)
> gg

Success! Created a new plotly here -> https://plot.ly/~anre005/570

It is also easy to plot single time series, e.g. the traded volume per day for BMW, and even to annotate the plot. The help page of the plot_ly() function tells us that the data should be a data.frame. Again we use our BMW data.frame from chapter 1.

> # find the maximum volume
> max_vol <- max(bmw[,"Volume"])
> 
> # find the index (rownumber) the maximum volume occurs
> ind <- which(bmw[,"Volume"] == max_vol)
> 
> # find the corresponding date
> date_max_vol <- bmw[ind,"Date"]
> 
> # plot Volume vs. Date
> p <- plot_ly(bmw, x = Date, y = Volume, type = "bar")
> 
> # finally, add annotation
> layout(p, annotations = list(x = date_max_vol, y = max_vol,
+                              text = "Maximum Volume", showarrow = T))

Success! Created a new plotly here -> https://plot.ly/~anre005/572