Pie plot with base R



A pie chart is a circle divided into sectors that each represent a proportion of the whole. This page explains how to build one with basic R commands.

Pie Chart section Why you should not do it

Most basic pie chart with pie()


R natively offers the pie() function that builds pie charts. The input is just a numeric variable, each value providing the value of a group of the piechart.

Important note: pie chart are widely known as a bad way to visualize information. Check this post for reasons and alternatives.

# Create Data
Prop <- c(3,7,9,1,2)
 
# Make the default Pie Plot
pie(Prop)

Change labels with labels


Provide a vector of labels to the labels argument to add names to piechart groups:

# You can also custom the labels:
pie(Prop , labels = c("Gr-A","Gr-B","Gr-C","Gr-D","Gr-E"))

Non-circular piechart with edges


Decrease the value of the edges argument to get angles around your piechart.

# If you give a low value to the "edge" argument, you go from something circular to a shape with edges
pie(Prop , labels = c("Gr-A","Gr-B","Gr-C","Gr-D","Gr-E") , edges=10)

Add stripes with density


The density arguments adds stripes.

You can control the angle of those stripes with angle.

# The density arguments adds stripes. You can control the angle of this lines with "angle"
pie(Prop , labels = c("Gr-A","Gr-B","Gr-C","Gr-D","Gr-E") , density=10 , angle=c(20,90,30,10,0))

Color with col and border


Change group color with col, and border color with border.

Here, the RcolorBrewer package is used to build a nice color palette.

# Prepare a color palette. Here with R color brewer:
library(RColorBrewer)
myPalette <- brewer.pal(5, "Set2") 

# You can change the border of each area with the classical parameters:
pie(Prop , labels = c("Gr-A","Gr-B","Gr-C","Gr-D","Gr-E"), border="white", col=myPalette )

Related chart types


Grouped and Stacked barplot
Treemap
Doughnut
Pie chart
Dendrogram
Circular packing



Contact

This document is a work by Yan Holtz. Any feedback is highly encouraged. You can fill an issue on Github, drop me a message on Twitter, or send an email pasting yan.holtz.data with gmail.com.

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