How to Make a Scatter Plot Matrix in R

Scatter plot matrix is a plot that generates a grid of pairwise scatter plots for multiple numeric variables. Creating a scatter plot matrix can be a useful way to visually explore relationships between several numeric variables quickly.

Code used in this code clip:

library(tidyverse)
library(GGally)

data ＜- mtcars

Scatter plot matrix in base R
pairs(~ mpg + hp + cyl + wt, data = data,
lower.panel = panel.smooth)

Scatter plot matrix with GGally
data %＞% ggpairs(columns = c("mpg", "hp", "cyl", "wt"),
upper = list(continuous = wrap('cor', size = 8)))

Scatter plot matrix with GGally, coloring by cyl
data %＞% mutate(cyl = factor(cyl)) %＞%
ggpairs(columns = c("mpg", "hp", "wt", "cyl"),
aes(color = cyl),
upper = list(continuous = wrap('cor', size = 5)),
lower = list(combo = wrap("facethist", bins = 30)),
diag = list(continuous = wrap("densityDiag", alpha = 0.5)))



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Note: YouTube does not allow greater than or less than symbols in the text description, so the code above may not be exactly the same as the code shown in the video! For R that means I may use = for assignment and the special Unicode large ＜ and ＞ symbols in place of the standard sized ones for dplyr pipes and comparisons. These special symbols should work as expected for R code on Windows, but may need to be replaced with standard greater than and less than symbols for other operating systems.