Creating a Timeline Plot Represented as Line Segments

Question

I am looking to create a plot in R where the y-axis represents unique id values, and the x-axis is a timeline. Each id should be represented by a line segment connecting two points: a start date and an end date. Below is an example dataset:

id<-c("id1","id2","id3")
start<-c("2010-02-01","2010-04-05","2010-03-08")
end<-c("2013-11-10","2013-01-01","2011-05-07")
data<-data.frame(id,start,end)

I need assistance with code or guidance on how to create this plot, with each id having its own line segment between its respective start and end dates. Any help or suggestions on how to approach this task would be greatly appreciated!

Here is a representation of what I'm looking for:

Answer 1

You can do this manually in base R by first creating a blank plot them adding in segments. I also added in points to distinguish the ends. You can play around with the parameters to tweak the look to exactly what you want:

plot(range(data$start, data$end), c(1, nrow(data)), 
     type = "n", xlab = "", ylab = "", axes = FALSE)
segments(x0 = data$start, x1 = data$end, y0 = 1:nrow(data), lwd = 3)
points(x = c(data$start, data$end), y = rep(1:nrow(data), 2), pch = 20, cex = 3)
axis(1, at = seq.Date(min(data$start), max(data$end), by = "month"),
     labels = seq.Date(min(data$start), max(data$end), by = "month"))
axis(2, at = 1:nrow(data), labels = data$id)

You may also be interested in the vistime package (but I personally find it a bit easier to control specifics in the above approach):

vistime::vistime(data)