Adding Interactivity to ggplot2 Maps with Plotly

Visualizing spatial data through maps is widely used to represent geographical information. Maps allow us to understand geographic distributions, compare regions, and analyze data within a spatial context. Whether it’s displaying population density, sales figures, or climate patterns, maps provide a visual representation that helps us draw meaningful insights from spatial data. Hence, adding interactivity to such maps can enhance the data visualization and help further explore the data.

The need for interactive maps

Interactive maps take data visualization to a whole new level by providing a dynamic experience that allows us to delve deeper into the data. We can interpret the data better using interactive maps through different features such as zooming and clicking the linked information. The ggplot2 package excels at displaying all types of data and is the go-to package for most applications.

Let’s create maps using the ggplot2 package and make them interactive with the plotly package.

Getting started with choropleth maps in ggplot2

A choropleth map is a map made up of colored polygons. It represents spatial patterns and variations of a specific attribute across different regions. The ggplot2 package offers the geom_polygon() function for creating choropleth maps.

Here, we’ll use the maps package, which contains the outlines of various geographical locations such as continents, countries, states, and counties.

First, let’s import the maps package using the following command: