gghexbin: An R package to enable the creation of high quality hexagonally binned graphs that can exploit all of ggplot2’s functionality

Hexagonal binning allows large datasets to be visualized and prevents overplotting of data, where points overlap and turn into a solid mass and information from the visualization is lost. This is useful in finance because of the large datasets used in studies (the U.S. stock market has 4,000+ securities), but is also applicable to other fields. Hexagonal binning is conceptually simple. Bin size scales with the number of points, allowing any number of points to be represented by a single bin, helping the observer to clearly see the density of data and additional visualizations (regression lines, groupings, etc.). Currently, such plots are generated using the {hexbin} package, which has two major issues.

1. It is built on top of {lattice}, which is being superseded by {ggplot2}.
2. Additional visualizations are handled poorly or are non-existent, as {hexbin} doesn't integrate well with other packages.

We will create a new package, {gghexbin}, to replace the existing {hexbin} package, which will integrate well with {ggplot2}, the most powerful and widely used visualization package for R. We expect that {gghexbin} will give improved performance and allow for use in a variety of fields.