Beanplot

Authors

[Editor] Hu Zheng;

[Contributors]

Modified

2026-01-17

Note

Hiplot website

This page is the tutorial for source code version of the Hiplot Beanplot plugin. You can also use the Hiplot website to achieve no code ploting. For more information please see the following link:

https://hiplot.cn/basic/beanplot?lang=en

The beanplot is a method of visualizing the distribution characteristics.

Setup

System Requirements: Cross-platform (Linux/MacOS/Windows)
Programming language: R
Dependent packages: data.table; jsonlite; ggplotify; beanplot

# Install packages
if (!requireNamespace("data.table", quietly = TRUE)) {
  install.packages("data.table")
}
if (!requireNamespace("jsonlite", quietly = TRUE)) {
  install.packages("jsonlite")
}
if (!requireNamespace("ggplotify", quietly = TRUE)) {
  install.packages("ggplotify")
}
if (!requireNamespace("beanplot", quietly = TRUE)) {
  install.packages("beanplot")
}

# Load packages
library(data.table)
library(jsonlite)
library(ggplotify)
library(beanplot)

sessioninfo::session_info("attached")

─ Session info ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
 setting  value
 version  R version 4.5.2 (2025-10-31)
 os       Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS
 system   x86_64, linux-gnu
 ui       X11
 language (EN)
 collate  C.UTF-8
 ctype    C.UTF-8
 tz       UTC
 date     2026-01-17
 pandoc   3.1.3 @ /usr/bin/ (via rmarkdown)
 quarto   1.8.27 @ /usr/local/bin/quarto

─ Packages ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
 package    * version date (UTC) lib source
 beanplot   * 1.3.1   2022-04-09 [1] RSPM
 data.table * 1.18.0  2025-12-24 [1] RSPM
 ggplotify  * 0.1.3   2025-09-20 [1] RSPM
 jsonlite   * 2.0.0   2025-03-27 [1] RSPM

 [1] /home/runner/work/_temp/Library
 [2] /opt/R/4.5.2/lib/R/site-library
 [3] /opt/R/4.5.2/lib/R/library
 * ── Packages attached to the search path.

──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

Data Preparation

The loaded data is data set (data on treatment outcomes of different treatment regimens).

# Load data
data <- data.table::fread(jsonlite::read_json("https://hiplot.cn/ui/basic/beanplot/data.json")$exampleData$textarea[[1]])
data <- as.data.frame(data)

# convert data structure
GroupOrder <- as.numeric(factor(data[, 2], levels = unique(data[, 2])))
data[, 2] <- paste0(data[,2], " ", as.numeric(factor(data[, 3])))
data <- cbind(data, GroupOrder)

# View data
head(data)

     Y     X  Group GroupOrder
1  4.2 low 1 treat1          1
2 11.5 low 1 treat1          1
3  7.3 low 1 treat1          1
4  5.8 low 1 treat1          1
5  6.4 low 1 treat1          1
6 10.0 low 1 treat1          1

Visualization

# Beanplot
p <- as.ggplot(function() {
  beanplot(Y ~ reorder(X, GroupOrder, mean), data = data, ll = 0.04,
           main = "Bean Plot", ylab = "Y", xlab = "X", side = "both",
           border = NA, horizontal = F, 
           col = list(c("#2b70c4", "#2b70c4"),c("#e9c216", "#e9c216")),
           beanlines = "mean", overallline = "mean", kernel = "gaussian")
  
  legend("bottomright", fill = c("#2b70c4", "#e9c216"),
         legend = levels(factor(data[, 3])))
})

p