How to change the color of points in a scatterplot using ggplot2 in R?

To color the points in a scatterplot using ggplot2, we can use colour argument inside geom_point with aes. The color can be passed in multiple ways, one such way is to name the particular color and the other way is to giving a range or using a variable. If range or a variable will be used then the color of the points will be in different shades.

Example

 Live Demo

Consider the below data frame −

x<−rnorm(20,5,2) y<−rnorm(20,5,1.25) df<−data.frame(x,y) df

Output

      x       y 1 6.3184535 5.548867 2 3.4643698 6.247067 3 7.8930528 2.259042 4 7.6517535 4.606704 5 1.7838941 3.605288 6 0.3985215 6.183794 7 5.2738435 3.857376 8 4.7734419 3.389663 9 3.9727197 5.662962 10 3.3976335 5.172815 11 4.1068840 4.379264 12 6.7723590 5.914132 13 3.0944360 4.184177 14 7.0857100 5.266121 15 2.6391362 4.433864 16 5.2571231 4.144391 17 5.8119542 4.725406 18 5.3608015 4.828909 19 9.7308286 6.489042 20 2.3823201 6.916862

Loading ggplot2 package and creating a scatterplot −

library(ggplot2) ggplot(df,aes(x,y,col=x))+geom_point()

Output

Creating the scatterplot by using the variable x −

Example

ggplot(df,aes(x,y))+geom_point(aes(colour=x))

Output