Bad by definition

A pie chart is a circle divided into sectors that each represent a proportion of the whole. It is often used to show percentage, where the sum of the sectors equals 100%.

The problem is that humans are pretty bad at reading angles. In the adjacent pie chart, try to figure out which group is the biggest one and try to order them by value. You will probably struggle to do so and this is why pie charts must be avoided.

# Libraries
library(tidyverse)
library(hrbrthemes)
library(viridis)
library(patchwork)

# create 3 data frame:
data1 <- data.frame( name=letters[1:5], value=c(17,18,20,22,24) )
data2 <- data.frame( name=letters[1:5], value=c(20,18,21,20,20) )
data3 <- data.frame( name=letters[1:5], value=c(24,23,21,19,18) )

# Plot
plot_pie <- function(data, vec){

ggplot(data, aes(x="name", y=value, fill=name)) +
  geom_bar(width = 1, stat = "identity") +
  coord_polar("y", start=0, direction = -1) +
  scale_fill_viridis(discrete = TRUE,  direction=-1) + 
  geom_text(aes(y = vec, label = rev(name), size=4, color=c( "white", rep("black", 4)))) +
  scale_color_manual(values=c("black", "white")) +
  theme_ipsum() +
  theme(
    legend.position="none",
    plot.title = element_text(size=14),
    panel.grid = element_blank(),
    axis.text = element_blank(),
    legend.margin=unit(0, "null")
  ) +
  xlab("") +
  ylab("")
  
}

plot_pie(data1, c(10,35,55,75,93))