How to pass multiple formulae in geom_smooth (facet_wrap) in R ggplot2?

Question

I want to fit three different functions for each of these factors (var.test). I tried the following method but I get an error that reads Warning messages: 1: Computation failed in stat_smooth():invalid formula. Any other way to get multiple formulae to read be passed at once?

set.seed(14)
df <- data.frame(
  var.test = c("T","T","T","T","M","M","M","M","A","A","A","A"),
  val.test = rnorm(12,4,5),
  x = c(1:12)
)

my.formula <- c(y~x + I(x^2), y~x, y~x + I(x^2))

ggplot(df, aes(x = x, y = val.test)) + geom_point() +
  geom_smooth(method="glm", formula = my.formula, 
              method.args = list(family = "poisson"), color = "black" ) + facet_grid(.~var.test)

Answer 1

You can only have one formula per geom_smooth(). You'll need to add three different geom_smooth layers. YOu can do that manually

ggplot(df, aes(x = x, y = val.test)) + 
  geom_point() +
  geom_smooth(method="glm", formula = my.formula[[1]], method.args = list(family = "poisson"), color = "black" ) + 
  geom_smooth(method="glm", formula = my.formula[[2]], method.args = list(family = "poisson"), color = "black" ) + 
  geom_smooth(method="glm", formula = my.formula[[3]], method.args = list(family = "poisson"), color = "black" ) + 
  facet_grid(.~var.test)

Or you can use lapply to help

ggplot(df, aes(x = x, y = val.test)) + 
  geom_point() +
  lapply(my.formula, function(x) geom_smooth(method="glm", formula = x, 
              method.args = list(family = "poisson"), color = "black" )) + 
  facet_grid(.~var.test)

If you want different lines per panel, then you can filter your data for each panel. Here we use an mapply helper and subset the data for each line.

ggplot(df, aes(x = x, y = val.test)) + 
  geom_point() +
  mapply(function(x, z) geom_smooth(method="glm", data=function(d) subset(d, var.test==z), formula = x, 
              method.args = list(family = "poisson"), color = "black" ),
         my.formula, c("A","M","T")) + 
facet_grid(.~var.test)