anvdn / goyav

An R package meant to create animated gifs from a dynamic interface.

Tutorial: the goyav package

Antonin Vidon 10/29/2021

Installation

The package is located on my GitHub. From the RStudio IDE, You should install it with the devtools library using the following lines of code.

# install 'devtools'
install.packages("devtools")

# import 'devtools'
library(devtools)

# install 'goyav' from github
install_github("anvdn/goyav")

# import 'goyav'
library(goyav)

You may have to upgrade some of your packages in order to successfully install goyav.

The goyav package

Description

goyav is a shiny App meant to generate GIF from tabular temporal data. All customization of the animated plots is done in an interactive window.

The dashboard of the application looks like this :

The user is able to navigate into two tabs : “Animate” and “Advanced animate”, the latter offering a wider range of customization.

From the Animate tab, you may choose the following :

• X variable (numeric);
• Y variable (numeric);
• size variable (numeric);
• color variable (factor);
• temporal variable (numeric);
• choose if you want to apply a log-scale to either X, Y or X and Y.

From the Advanced animated tab, you may choose the following :

• X variable (numeric);
• Y variable (numeric);
• size variable (numeric);
• color variable (factor);
• temporal variable (numeric);
• choose if you want to apply a log-scale to either X, Y or X and Y.
• X range;
• Y range;
• Temporal range;
• Animation duration (s);
• Factors to include (for the color variable).

Demonstration

In order to better show the use of the package, we will import and use the gapminder dataset from the gapminder package.

# install `gapminder`
install.packages("gapminder")

# load `gapminder`
library(gapminder)

# display first rows of dataset
knitr::kable(head(gapminder))

country	continent	year	lifeExp	pop	gdpPercap
Afghanistan	Asia	1952	28.801	8425333	779.4453
Afghanistan	Asia	1957	30.332	9240934	820.8530
Afghanistan	Asia	1962	31.997	10267083	853.1007
Afghanistan	Asia	1967	34.020	11537966	836.1971
Afghanistan	Asia	1972	36.088	13079460	739.9811
Afghanistan	Asia	1977	38.438	14880372	786.1134

In order to be able to create any GIF, your dataframe should have candidate columns for the following variables: X, Y, size and temporal. Therefore, calling the goyav function on a dataframe with less than 4 numeric variables will return an error.

# try to call the `goyav` function on the first 3 columns of the `gapminder` dataset
goyav(gapminder[,1:3])

## Error in goyav(gapminder[, 1:3]): Your dataframe should have at least 4 numeric variables.

Let’s now call goyav on the whole dataset :

# call `goyav` on `gapminder`
goyav(gapminder)

View from the Animate tab

View from the Advanced animate tab