For Novice: gganimate in R

It is very fun to play around with this gganimate package. This is considered a very simple tool to add the fancy animation effect to a diagram. I first came to know about these fascinating graphs from a presentation of world-famous statistician Hans Rosling in a TED video (I wow to discover that it was a 13 years old video!). 

I was inspired by the article written by Dr Keith McNulty. After trying out his tutorial, I wanted to make an animated graphic for my spending record to get more learning of the package.

I have been keeping a habit to record my spending in Excel, divided them into six categories: food, travel, personal (whatever counted as my shopping expense), home (things I bought for my family), gift (things that I bought for friends), and transportation (fuels, Toll, or public transportation expenses). The expenses were counted in MYR (Malaysia Ringgit) and summarised monthly. I have modified all the amounts for the exercise. 

Below is a glance of the data (from 2018 to 2019) in the CSV file format.

head(spending2019)
>   ï..Year Month     Time Category    MYR   Saving
1    2019   Jan 1/1/2019     Food 197.55   561.37         
2    2019   Feb 1/2/2019     Food 181.88   311.40         
3    2019   Mar 1/3/2019     Food 172.20 -1078.07         
4    2019   Apr 1/4/2019     Food 210.05   269.34       
5    2019   May 1/5/2019     Food 235.69   241.11     
6    2019   Jun 1/6/2019     Food 161.65 -1423.08     


R script:

library(ggplot2)
library(gganimate)
theme_set(theme_bw())
library(gapminder)
library(gifski)
spending2019 <- read.csv("C:/Users/Lynn/Documents/Spending2019.csv") 

p <- ggplot(
  spending2019, 
  aes(x = Saving, y= MYR, size = MYR, colour = Category)
) + 
  geom_point(aes(color = Category, fill = Category), shape = 21, show.legend = TRUE, alpha = 0.7, size = 5, stroke = 1) +
  scale_color_viridis_d() +
  labs(x = "Saving (MYR)", y = "Spending (MYR)")
p

anim <- p + facet_wrap(~Category) +
  transition_time(as.Date(spending2019$Time,format = "%d/%m/%Y")) + labs(title = "Time:{frame_time}") +
  shadow_mark(alpha = 1, size = 1)

animate(anim, fps = 5, width = 750, height = 450)
anim_save("Spending_P1.gif")

#####################create facets by categoryanim <- p + facet_wrap(~Category) +  transition_time(as.Date(spending2019$Time,format = "%d/%m/%Y")) + labs(title = "Time:{frame_time}") +  shadow_mark(alpha = 1, size = 1)
animate(anim, fps = 5, width = 750, height = 450)anim_save("Spending_P2.gif")

P1 in GIF

P2 in GIF

I'm pretty satisfied with the illustration P2 (the second GIF above), which clearly shows that the spending on food was very consistent throughout the year 2018 to 2019, and it is similarly stable for category Gift. However, the shopping and travel expenses were obviously spiked spontaneously and impulsively, mostly due to the poor financial monitoring of the person. XD From the chart above, one can observe that in the earlier year (2018) this person tends to save more money,  but for 2019 errrr.... haha.

Overall, this is a very simple play-around package and suitable for the beginner of R user to explore the basic R structure and operation. Here, I also would like to highlight one small troubleshooting while running the script. When it comes to animate part, there was an error that "Warning message:file_renderer failed to copy frames to the destination directory". This can be solved easily by removing the "read-only" mode of the working destination, and then restart the R session. 

Stay curious and have fun.