Connected Scatterplot

Authors

[Editor] Hu Zheng;

[Contributors]

Modified

2026-01-17

Note

Hiplot website

This page is the tutorial for source code version of the Hiplot Connected Scatterplot 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/connected-scatterplot?lang=en

Connected scatterplot

Setup

  • System Requirements: Cross-platform (Linux/MacOS/Windows)

  • Programming language: R

  • Dependent packages: data.table; jsonlite; ggplot2; dplyr; ggrepel

# Install packages
if (!requireNamespace("data.table", quietly = TRUE)) {
  install.packages("data.table")
}
if (!requireNamespace("jsonlite", quietly = TRUE)) {
  install.packages("jsonlite")
}
if (!requireNamespace("ggplot2", quietly = TRUE)) {
  install.packages("ggplot2")
}
if (!requireNamespace("dplyr", quietly = TRUE)) {
  install.packages("dplyr")
}
if (!requireNamespace("ggrepel", quietly = TRUE)) {
  install.packages("ggrepel")
}

# Load packages
library(data.table)
library(jsonlite)
library(ggplot2)
library(dplyr)
library(ggrepel)
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
 data.table * 1.18.0  2025-12-24 [1] RSPM
 dplyr      * 1.1.4   2023-11-17 [1] RSPM
 ggplot2    * 4.0.1   2025-11-14 [1] RSPM
 ggrepel    * 0.9.6   2024-09-07 [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

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

# View data
head(data)
  year Alice Anna
1 1991   724 7118
2 1992   686 6846
3 1993   684 6808
4 1994   595 7523
5 1995   579 8564
6 1996   593 8565

Visualization

# Connected Scatterplot
connected_scatterplot <- function(data, x, y, label, label_ratio, line_color, arrow_size, label_size) {

  draw_data <- data.frame(
    x = data[[x]],
    y = data[[y]],
    label = data[[label]]
  )

  add_label_data <- draw_data %>% sample_frac(label_ratio)
  rm(data)

  p <- ggplot(draw_data, aes(x = x, y = y, label = label)) +
    geom_point(color = line_color) +
    geom_text_repel(data = add_label_data, size = label_size) +
    geom_segment(
      color = line_color,
      aes(
        xend = c(tail(x, n = -1), NA),
        yend = c(tail(y, n = -1), NA)
      ),
      arrow = arrow(length = unit(arrow_size, "mm"))
    )

  return(p)
}

p <- connected_scatterplot(
  data = if (exists("data") && is.data.frame(data)) data else "",
  x = "Alice",
  y = "Anna",
  label = "year",
  label_ratio = 0.5,
  line_color = "#1A237E",
  arrow_size = 2,
  label_size = 2.5
) +
  theme_bw() +
  theme(text = element_text(family = "Arial"),
        plot.title = element_text(size = 12,hjust = 0.5),
        axis.title = element_text(size = 12),
        axis.text = element_text(size = 10),
        axis.text.x = element_text(angle = 0, hjust = 0.5,vjust = 1),
        legend.position = "right",
        legend.direction = "vertical",
        legend.title = element_text(size = 10),
        legend.text = element_text(size = 10))

p
FigureΒ 1: Connected Scatterplot