r - Stacked histograms like in flow cytometry

Question

I'm trying to use ggplot or base R to produce something like the following:

I know how to do histograms with ggplot2, and can easily separate them using facet_grid or facet_wrap. But I'd like to "stagger" them vertically, such that they have some overlap, as shown below. Sorry, I'm not allowed to post my own image, and it's quite difficult to find a simpler picture of what I want. If I could, I would only post the top-left panel.

I understand that this is not a particularly good way to display data -- but that decision does not rest with me.

A sample dataset would be as follows:

my.data <- as.data.frame(rbind( cbind( rnorm(1e3), 1) , cbind( rnorm(1e3)+2, 2), cbind( rnorm(1e3)+3, 3), cbind( rnorm(1e3)+4, 4)))

And I can plot it with geom_histogram as follows:

ggplot(my.data) + geom_histogram(aes(x=V1,fill=as.factor(V2))) + facet_grid( V2~.)

But I'd like the y-axes to overlap.

Answer 1

require(ggplot2)
require(plyr)

my.data <- as.data.frame(rbind( cbind( rnorm(1e3), 1) , cbind(     rnorm(1e3)+2, 2), cbind( rnorm(1e3)+3, 3), cbind( rnorm(1e3)+4, 4)))
my.data$V2=as.factor(my.data$V2)

calculate the density depending on V2

res <- dlply(my.data, .(V2), function(x) density(x$V1))
dd <- ldply(res, function(z){
  data.frame(Values = z[["x"]], 
             V1_density = z[["y"]],
             V1_count = z[["y"]]*z[["n"]])
})

add an offset depending on V2

dd$offest=-as.numeric(dd$V2)*0.2 # adapt the 0.2 value as you need
dd$V1_density_offest=dd$V1_density+dd$offest

and plot

ggplot(dd, aes(Values, V1_density_offest, color=V2)) + 
  geom_line()+
  geom_ribbon(aes(Values, ymin=offest,ymax=V1_density_offest,     fill=V2),alpha=0.3)+
  scale_y_continuous(breaks=NULL)