Clarification on HW05 Exercise 2

[dy-lin]

For the Gapminder questions:

Use the forcats package to change the order of the factor levels, based on summarized information of one of the quantitative variables. Consider experimenting with a summary statistic beyond the most basic choice of the mean/median. Use the forcats package in the tidyverse for this, rather than the baseR function as.factor.

Can I order the factor levels on a quantitative variable that isn't shown in the plot? (i.e. a geom_bar plot of count vs continent but order the factors by mean lifeExp?) I am asking because if that is the case, then it is not immediately obvious on the plot what I am ordering by like it would be if I ordered by counts, or plotted mean lifeExp vs continent?

[wvictor14]

• One of the points of this exercise was to understand when re-ordering factor levels might be useful.
• If it is not obvious that your factor re-ordering had an effect, the re-ordering was probably unnecessary.
• Therefore, I would suggest making a plot where re-ordering of the factor levels has an obvious beneficial effect on the plot (i.e. improves readability).