XKCD Style Graphs With R

Two years I started doing CrossFit and have since gotten kind of into it. After the CrossFit Open last year, I decided to dive a little deeper into the stats available and was able to prove, using public data, that I’m not very good at CrossFit.

Even still, the data set was amazing — over a hundred thousand people participated in a series of workouts, with details like height, age, gender and weight on most of them. With this, I started looking for patterns. Do taller people do better at a specific movement? How much does experience in CrossFit affect ranking? This lead me down a rabbit hole that is the statistics community.

Getting Started with R

I got my introduction to R when writing the JavaScript/HTML front-end for the Code Schools Try R course. Jay McGavren did an amazing job on the content. I still laugh thinking about finding the mean number of limbs in a group of pirates who had obviously been through some hard times.

Try R is still one of my favorite Code School courses. It’s free and only takes about an hour to go through. It also introduces some of the core concepts of R that come in handy by reading the code below.

(Re)Learnings Statistics

Like most people, I took some statistics in college, but don’t use too much of it on a daily basis. Lucky for me, Coursera has some amazing stats classes. The one I ended up going through was called Statistics: Making Sense of Data, which hit close to what I was wanting to learn.

One of the nice parts about the format was it was taught similarly to how it would be taught at a university — with the main instructors teaching the statistics side, then with shorter follow-up videos detailing how to do the same thing in R.

A Boxplot Graph

Armed with new information about how to draw information from… other information, I went ahead and started making my first graph — a handy boxplot. All the information is loaded into a Postgres database and put together in the following script.

# Setup Postgres connection
library('RPostgreSQL')
drv <- dbDriver("PostgreSQL")
con <- dbConnect(drv, dbname="crossfitopen_development")

# Query the database
rs <- dbSendQuery(con,"select info_time_crossfitting, wod1_score
        from athletes where mens=FALSE and info_time_crossfitting
        is not null and wod1_score > 5")

# Load in our 70k rows
results <- fetch(rs,n=-1)

# Give names to our columns
colnames(results) = c('Experience', 'Score')

# Create R variables for each column in the database
# Creates:
#   Experience vector
#   Score vector
attach(results)

# Order our Experience vector
Experience = factor(Experience, c('Less than 6 months', '6-12 months',
            '1-2 years', '2-4 years', '4+ years', 'Decline to answer'))

# Create Barplot!
boxplot(Score~Experience, range=0,  main='WOD 13.1 By Experience (Women)')Code language: PHP (php)

This pulled up an easy-to-understand Boxplot.

Each vertical box represents what 50% of the population on that vertical achieved, with the line inside the boxplot representing the median for that segment. Seeing as how I’d been CrossFitting for 1-2 years, and only scored 100 on this workout, I was sad to see my score was in the bottom 25% for my group. I knew I had to look deeper to see how I compared.

Having Fun With XKCD

I stumbled upon the XKCD Package For R not too long after, and decided to have some fun with this data. This library is plain out amazing, and impressive. Looking at the examples on the page alone I knew it was way over my head being still very new to R. But with one chart in mind — my ranking on the 5 workouts — I decided to start writing a graph using the XKCD style.

library(extrafont)
loadfonts()
library(xkcd)

# Bring in the data!
#   workout=c(1:5) - creates a range from 1-5, so 1,2,3,4,5
#   c(16...) - These are my percentiles for the five workouts, resepectively
scores <- data.frame(workout=c(1:5), rank=c(16.71, 4.21, 19.61, 4.9, 19.38))

# Define how much of the X and Y access to show.
# In our case, we'll show all of the Y access,
# but only 1-5 on the X access side.
xrange <- range(scores$workout)
yrange <- range(c(0,100))
ratioxy <- diff(xrange) / diff(yrange)

# Let's create XKCD style stick figure
# I blatantly copied this part from the sample code
mapping <- aes(x,  y,
                scale,
                ratioxy,
                angleofspine ,
                anglerighthumerus,
                anglelefthumerus,
                anglerightradius,
                angleleftradius,
                anglerightleg,
                angleleftleg,
                angleofneck)
# The c(1.5,4.5) reprents the X coordinates of each of the 2 stick figures --
# likewise for the y coordinate. The rest of these control the arms and legs
dataman <- data.frame( x= c(1.5,4.5), y=c(80, 70),
                       scale = 17,
                       ratioxy = ratioxy,
                       angleofspine =  -pi/2  ,
                       anglerighthumerus = c(-pi/6, -pi/6),
                       anglelefthumerus = c(-pi/2 - pi/6, -pi/2 - pi/6),
                       anglerightradius = c(pi/5, -pi/5),
                       angleleftradius = c(pi/5, -pi/5),
                       angleleftleg = 3*pi/2  + pi / 12 ,
                       anglerightleg = 3*pi/2  - pi / 12,
                       angleofneck = runif(1, 3*pi/2-pi/10, 3*pi/2+pi/10))

# Those squigly lines that connect text to a character are easy to draw.
# Each needs an x/y start point and an x/y end point. The library does the rest.
datalines <- data.frame(xbegin=c(1.9,4.2,2),
                        ybegin=c(80,70,77),
                        xend=c(2.1,3.9,2.8),
                        yend=c(88,80,68))

# Using ggplot to do the actual graphing -- an versatile graphing library for R
p <- ggplot() + geom_smooth(mapping=aes(x=workout, y =rank),
                            data=scores,
                            method="loess")

# Do ALL the generating!
# This includes putting everything together and adding the sample text we want to write.
# Of course, this text should be written using the xkcd font.
p + xkcdaxis(xrange,yrange) +
   ylab("Percentile") +
   xkcdman(mapping, dataman) +
   annotate("text", x=2.4, y = 93, label = "There's a lot of\nroom up here", family="xkcd" ) +
   annotate("text", x=4.1, y = 83, label = "Let's do 7 minutes of Burpees!", family="xkcd" ) +
   annotate("text", x=2.8, y = 62, label = "I will use your face\nas a wallball target...", family="xkcd" ) +
   xkcdline(aes(xbegin=xbegin,ybegin=ybegin,xend=xend,yend=yend),datalines, xjitteramount = 0.11)Code language: PHP (php)

Running this in the R console generates a pretty slick graph:

Even if I don’t see myself creating loads of XKCD-style graphs, getting one made was a lot of fun.

If you’re curious about what else you can do with the XKCD library, check out the documentation.