How to create stacked barplot using barplot function in R?

To create a stacked barplot using barplot function we need to use matrix instead of a data frame object because in R barplot function can be used for a vector or for a matrix only. We must be very careful if we want to create a stacked bar plot using barplot function because bar plots are created for count data only. Here, you will see some examples of count as well as continuous data, carefully read the graphs and understand how the graphs are different from each other.

Example1

 Live Demo

M1<−matrix(rnorm(40),ncol=4)
M1

Output

      [,1]       [,2]       [,3]       [,4]
[1,] −1.3035243 1.3221939 1.9557782 0.1202694
[2,] −1.2548522 −1.7679306 0.5101073 0.9979115
[3,] 0.1095688 −1.5652809 1.1426236 −0.2278059
[4,] 0.6143122 −0.6680945 −0.9518161 0.7849978
[5,] 0.7078449 0.2490338 −1.1855153 0.3580386
[6,] −1.3651111 −1.2632633 −0.7954036 0.5127274
[7,] −0.4638549 −0.9650625 0.7063811 −2.2920743
[8,] −0.3006626 0.6249937 −0.5921453 0.5214382
[9,] 0.5874841 0.1630416 1.4858325 0.2483941
[10,] −0.5604357 −2.1200705 1.7315785 0.4596253

Example

barplot(M1)

Output

Example2

 Live Demo

M2<−matrix(rpois(40,10),ncol=4)
M2

Output

[,1] [,2] [,3] [,4]
[1,] 12 11 11 8
[2,] 9 14 7 5
[3,] 11 6 8 14
[4,] 5 10 10 9
[5,] 8 8 14 10
[6,] 12 12 12 11
[7,] 6 15 4 11
[8,] 12 6 10 10
[9,] 6 10 11 11
[10,] 13 7 15 7

Example

barplot(M2)

Output

Example3

 Live Demo

M3<−matrix(sample(0:9,100,replace=TRUE),ncol=10)
M3

Output

      [,1]    [,2]    [,3]    [,4]    [,5]    [,6]    [,7]    [,8]    [,9]    [,10]
[1,]    2       8       7       4       3       2       1       1       1       4
[2,]    3       6       9       7       8       3       7       2       5       7
[3,]    7       1       3       9       7       9       7       0       5       7
[4,]    1       1       3       5       0       9       3       5       8       6
[5,]    4       2       6       2       3       8       4       8       2       8
[6,]    3       6       2       9       1       5       1       9       6       5
[7,]    2       1       9       3       6       8       1       3       2       2
[8,]    4       0       2       8       4       7       4       6       6       4
[9,]    0       6       9       9       7       5       8       2       0       7  
[10,]    1       3       5       3       9       7       8       4       0       3

Example

barplot(M3)

Output