Pyramid Stack

Authors

[Editor] Hu Zheng;

[Contributors]

Modified

2026-01-17

Note

Hiplot website

This page is the tutorial for source code version of the Hiplot Pyramid Stack 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/pyramid-stack?lang=en

The pyramid stack is a pyramid-like figure that distributes data on both sides of a central axis.

Setup

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

  • Programming language: R

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

# 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("ggthemes", quietly = TRUE)) {
  install.packages("ggthemes")
}
if (!requireNamespace("dplyr", quietly = TRUE)) {
  install.packages("dplyr")
}

# Load packages
library(data.table)
library(jsonlite)
library(ggplot2)
library(ggthemes)
library(dplyr)
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
 ggthemes   * 5.2.0   2025-11-30 [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/pyramid-stack/data.json")$exampleData[[1]]$textarea[[1]])
data <- as.data.frame(data)

# Convert data structure
data[,3] <- factor(data[,3], levels = unique(data[,3]))
data[,1] <- factor(data[,1], levels = unique(data[,1]))

# View data
head(data)
    age gender year       pop
1   0-4   male 1950 171.85124
2   5-9   male 1950 137.99242
3 10-14   male 1950 133.27428
4 15-19   male 1950 121.69274
5 20-24   male 1950 112.39438
6 25-29   male 1950  96.59408

Visualization

# Pyramid Stack
p <- ggplot(data = data, aes(x = age, y = pop, fill = year)) +
  geom_bar(data = data %>% filter(gender == "female") %>% arrange(rev(year)),
           stat = "identity", position = "identity") +
  geom_bar(data = data %>% filter(gender == "male") %>% arrange(rev(year)),
           stat = "identity", position = "identity", mapping = aes(y = -pop)) +
  coord_flip() +
  geom_hline(yintercept = 0) +
  scale_fill_economist() +
  scale_fill_manual(values = c("#e04d39","#5bbad6","#1e9f86")) +
  labs(y = "pop | male (left) - female (right)", x= "") +
  theme_economist(horizontal = FALSE) +
  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 = "top",
        legend.direction = "horizontal",
        legend.title = element_text(size = 10),
        legend.text = element_text(size = 10),
        panel.grid.major = element_blank(),
        panel.grid.minor = element_blank())

p
FigureΒ 1: Pyramid Stack