Interactive Visualisation of the Profitable Amount of Waste to Dispose Illegally

“Wow!” – I said to myself after reading R Helps With Employee Churn post – “I can create interactive plots in R?!!! I have to try it out!”

I quickly came up with an idea of creating interactive plot for my simple model for assessment of the profitable ratio between the volume waste that could be illegally disposed and costs of illegal disposal [Ryabov Y. (2013) Rationale of mechanisms for the land protection from illegal dumping (an example from the St.-Petersburg and Leningrad region). Regional Researches. №1 (39), p. 49-56]. The conditions for profitable illegal dumping can be describes as follows:

Here: k – the probability of being fined for illegal disposal of waste;
P – maximum fine for illegal disposal of waste (illegal dumping);
V – volume of waste to be [illegally] disposed by the waste owner;
E – costs of illegal disposal of waste per unit;
T – official tax for waste disposal per unit.

The conditions for the profitable landfilling can be described as follows:
Here: V1 – total volume of waste that is supposed to be disposed at illegal landfill;
Tc – tax for disposal of waste at illegal landfill per unit;
P1 – maximum fine for illegal landfilling;
E1 – expenditures of the illegal landfill owner for disposal of waste per unit.

Lets plot the graphs (with some random numbers (except for fines) for a nice looking representation) to have a clue how it looks like.


Note that there is a footnote (this post provides nice examples on how to do it) with the values used for plotting – it is important to have to have this kind of indication if we want to create a series of plots.

Now I will show you the result and then will provide the code and some tips.

Playing with the plot

Tips and Tricks

Before I will show you code I want to share my hardly earned knowledge about nuances of the manipulate library. There are several ways to get static plot like that using ggplot, but some of them will fail to be interactive with manipulate.

1. All the data for the plot must be stored in one dataframe.
2. All data for plots must be derived from the dataframe (avoid passing single variables to ggplot).
3. Do not use geom_hline() for the horizontal line – generate values for this line and store them inside dataframe and draw as a regular graph.
4. To create a footnote (to know exactly which parameters were used for the current graph) use arrangeGrob() function from the gridExtra library.
5. Always use $ inside aes() settings to address columns of your dataframe if you want plots to be interactive

The Code