quick replication of an Excel graph that was recoded in SPSS in 21 lines (excluding data preparation)

us_recessions.R

require(ggplot2)
require(plyr)
require(xlsx)

# http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2013/05/april-employment-report-165000-jobs-75.html
# https://andrewpwheeler.wordpress.com/2013/03/18/the-junk-charts-challenge-remaking-a-great-line-chart-in-spss/
# http://www.minneapolisfed.org/publications_papers/studies/recession_perspective/

link = "http://www.minneapolisfed.org/publications_papers/studies/recession_perspective/data/historical_recessions_recoveries_data_05_03_2013.xls"
file = "data/us.recessions.4807.xls"
data = "data/us.recessions.4807.txt"

if(!file.exists(data)) {
  if(!file.exists(file)) download(link, file, mode = "wb")
  file <- read.xlsx(file, 1, rowIndex = c(6, 8:80), colIndex = 1:12)
  write.csv(file, data, row.names = FALSE)
}

data <- read.csv(data, stringsAsFactors = FALSE)
str(data)

names(data) <- c("t", gsub("X", "", names(data)[-1]))
data <- melt(data, id = "t", variable = "recession.year")
head(data)

notes <- ddply(na.omit(data), .(recession.year), summarise, 
               x = max(t) + 1, 
               y = value[max(t) + 1])

qplot(data = data, x = t, y = value, group = recession.year, geom = "line") +
  geom_line(data = subset(data, recession.year == 2007), 
            color = "red", size = 1) +
  geom_text(data = notes, aes(x = x, y = y, label = recession.year), hjust = 0,
            color = ifelse(notes$recession.year == 2007, "red", "black")) +
  geom_hline(y = 0, linetype = "dashed") +
  scale_x_continuous("Months after peak", lim = c(0, 75)) +
  labs(y = "Cumulative decline from NBER peak")