Making Merry Christmas Tree in R

Last updated on Dec 25, 2021 2 min read Data Science

In this blog post, I ll show that how we can generate data for christmas tree and plot it using R.

Load libraries

library(tidyverse)
library(mlbench)
library(viridis)

Generating data for the tree

At first, I’ll generate data for the canopy (triangular format) and stem of the tree.

Canopy

There are many ways to generate data but it can be tricky to generate data based on a specific shape. I found an easy way to generate data for basic shapes formats i.e., square, circle or triangle to name a few. R package mlbench provides functions to to generate datasets of various shapes. I used mlbench.shapes function that generates data on the pattern of a Gaussian, square, triangle and wave in 2 dimensions.

set.seed(12345)
data <- mlbench.shapes(n=100000) 
plot(data)

# Extract trianglular data = class 3
canopy <- data %>%
  as.data.frame() %>% 
  filter(classes == "3")

# plot canopy data
plot(canopy$x.x4, canopy$x.V2, col = "darkgreen", xlab = "x", ylab = "y")

Tree stem

For tree stem, I’ll generate a small rectangular data frame that we can add under canopy.

y <- c(0.8, 1, 1, 0.8)  
x <- c(00.8, 00.8, 1.2, 1.2)

# bind columns as a data frame
trunk = as.data.frame(cbind(x, y))

# plot data
plot(x, y)
polygon(x, y, col = 'brown')

Christmas tree

Now I’ll plot the tree using different plotting functions in ggplot2 package of R.

Points

p1 <- ggplot() +
  geom_polygon(aes(x = x, y = y), data = trunk, fill = "brown") +
  geom_point(aes(x = x.x4, y = x.V2), shape = 3, data = canopy, colour = "darkgreen") +
  theme_void()

p1

Hexagons

p2 <- ggplot() +
  geom_polygon(aes(x = x, y = y), data = trunk, fill = "brown") +
  geom_hex(aes(x = x.x4, y = x.V2), data = canopy) +
  scale_fill_viridis() +
  theme_void() +
  theme(legend.position = "none")

p2

2-D Bins

p3 <- ggplot() +
  geom_polygon(aes(x = x, y = y), data = trunk, fill = "brown") +
  geom_bin2d(aes(x = x.x4, y = x.V2), data = canopy) +
  scale_fill_viridis() +
  theme_void() +
  theme(legend.position = "none")

p3

2-D Density

p4 <- ggplot() +
  geom_polygon(aes(x = x, y = y), data = trunk, fill = "brown") +
  stat_density_2d(aes(x = x.x4, y = x.V2, fill = ..level..), data = canopy, geom = "polygon") +
  scale_fill_viridis() +
  theme_void() +
  theme(legend.position = "none")

p4

Combine all trees

library(patchwork)

p1 + p2 + p3 + p4 + plot_annotation(
  title = 'Merry Christmas 2021',
  theme = theme(plot.title = element_text(size = 18, hjust = 0.5)))

If you like it, please share with others also!

ggplot2 chrismas visualizations chrismas tree R