Dumbbell Chart

Authors

[Editor] Hu Zheng;

[Contributors]

Modified

2026-01-17

Note

Hiplot website

This page is the tutorial for source code version of the Hiplot Dumbbell Chart 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/dumbbell?lang=en

Dumbbell Chart can display the data change.

Setup

System Requirements: Cross-platform (Linux/MacOS/Windows)
Programming language: R
Dependent packages: data.table; jsonlite; ggplot2; ggalt

# 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("ggalt", quietly = TRUE)) {
  remotes::install_github("hrbrmstr/ggalt")
}

# Load packages
library(data.table)
library(jsonlite)
library(ggplot2)
library(ggalt)

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
 ggalt      * 0.6.1   2025-11-02 [1] Github (hrbrmstr/ggalt@8941f8c)
 ggplot2    * 4.0.1   2025-11-14 [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/dumbbell/data.json")$exampleData$textarea[[1]])
data <- as.data.frame(data)

# View data
head(data)

    country  y1952  y2007
1 Argentina 62.485 75.320
2   Bolivia 40.414 65.554
3    Brazil 50.917 72.390
4    Canada 68.750 80.653
5     Chile 54.745 78.553
6  Colombia 50.643 72.889

Visualization

# Dumbbell Chart
colors <- c("#3B4992FF","#EE0000FF")
p <- ggplot(data, aes(y = reorder(country, y1952), x = y1952, xend = y2007)) +
  geom_dumbbell(size = 1, size_x = 3,  size_xend = 3, colour = "#AFAFAF",  
                colour_x = colors[1],  colour_xend = colors[2]) +
  labs(title = "Dummbbell Chart", x = "Life Expectancy (years)",
       y = "country") +
  theme_minimal() +
  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