Sankey diagrams with googleVis

Sankey diagrams are great for visualising flows from one set of data values to another. Although named after Irish Captain Matthew Henry Phineas Riall Sankey, who used this type of diagram in 1898 to show the energy efficiency of a steam engine, the best know Sankey diagram is probably Charles Minard's Map of Napoleon's Russian Campaign of 1812, which he actually produced in 1869.

Thomas Rahlf: Datendesign mit R

The above example from Thomas Rahlf's book Datendesign mit R shows that Minard's plot can be reproduced with base graphics in R. Aaron Berdanier posted in 2010 the SankeyR function and Erik Andrulis published the riverplot package on CRAN that allows users to create static Sankey charts as well.

Interactive Sankey diagram can be generated with rCharts and now also with googleVis (version >= 0.5.0). For my a first example I use UK visitor data from VisitBritain.org. The following diagram visualises the flow of visitors in 2012; where they came from and which parts of the UK they visited. This example illustrates the key concept already. I need a data frame with three columns that explains the flow of data from a source to a target and the strength or weight of the connection.




My next example uses a graph data set that I visualise in the same way again, but here I start to play around with the various parameters of the Google API.




As stated by Google, the Sankey chart may be undergoing substantial revisions in future Google Charts releases.

For more information and installation instructions see the googleVis project site and Google documentation.

Session Info

R version 3.0.3 (2014-03-06)
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin10.8.0 (64-bit)

locale:
[1] en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8/C/en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8

attached base packages:
[1] stats graphics grDevices utils datasets  methods  
[7] base     

other attached packages:
[1] googleVis_0.5.0-4 igraph_0.7.0     

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] RJSONIO_1.0-3 tools_3.0.3 

Sankey diagrams with googleVis

Sankey diagrams are great for visualising flows from one set of data values to another. Although named after Irish Captain Matthew Henry Phineas Riall Sankey, who used this type of diagram in 1898 to show the energy efficiency of a steam engine, the best know Sankey diagram is probably Charles Minard's Map of Napoleon's Russian Campaign of 1812, which he actually produced in 1869.

Thomas Rahlf: Datendesign mit R

The above example from Thomas Rahlf's book Datendesign mit R shows that Minard's plot can be reproduced with base graphics in R. Aaron Berdanier posted in 2010 the SankeyR function and Erik Andrulis published the riverplot package on CRAN that allows users to create static Sankey charts as well.

Interactive Sankey diagram can be generated with rCharts and now also with googleVis (version >= 0.5.0). For my a first example I use UK visitor data from VisitBritain.org. The following diagram visualises the flow of visitors in 2012; where they came from and which parts of the UK they visited. This example illustrates the key concept already. I need a data frame with three columns that explains the flow of data from a source to a target and the strength or weight of the connection.




My next example uses a graph data set that I visualise in the same way again, but here I start to play around with the various parameters of the Google API.




As stated by Google, the Sankey chart may be undergoing substantial revisions in future Google Charts releases.

For more information and installation instructions see the googleVis project site and Google documentation.

Session Info

R version 3.0.3 (2014-03-06)
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin10.8.0 (64-bit)

locale:
[1] en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8/C/en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8

attached base packages:
[1] stats graphics grDevices utils datasets  methods  
[7] base     

other attached packages:
[1] googleVis_0.5.0-4 igraph_0.7.0     

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] RJSONIO_1.0-3 tools_3.0.3 

Timeline charts with googleVis

Last year at the Google I/O conference Mitchell Foley presented new developments of the Google Chart Tools API and one of the new features he mentioned were timeline charts (about 6 min into the talk).

Timeline charts are a great way of visualising different dates/events over time and are now also supported by googleVis from version 0.5.0 onwards (currently only available from GitHub). Here is an example, showing classroom allocation in the afternoon. The exact times and durations are given when you hover over the bars.



I can swap around the bar and row labels to show the rooms by languages:



Here is another example, inspired by Jason Bryer's timeline package, showing the US presidents and UK prime ministers during World War II. For gvisTimeline I have to remove the line breaks in Jason's data.



And finally a more complex example from the Google Chart Tools API documentation showing the terms of the first US presidents with various options set to change the colours and fonts:
Read more �

Timeline charts with googleVis

Last year at the Google I/O conference Mitchell Foley presented new developments of the Google Chart Tools API and one of the new features he mentioned were timeline charts (about 6 min into the talk).

Timeline charts are a great way of visualising different dates/events over time and are now also supported by googleVis from version 0.5.0 onwards (currently only available from GitHub). Here is an example, showing classroom allocation in the afternoon. The exact times and durations are given when you hover over the bars.



I can swap around the bar and row labels to show the rooms by languages:



Here is another example, inspired by Jason Bryer's timeline package, showing the US presidents and UK prime ministers during World War II. For gvisTimeline I have to remove the line breaks in Jason's data.



And finally a more complex example from the Google Chart Tools API documentation showing the terms of the first US presidents with various options set to change the colours and fonts:
Read more �

googleVis code development moved to GitHub

After nearly 4 years of developing googleVis on Google Code with SVN we decided to move to GitHub. The main reason was that Google stopped the facility of hosting pre-CRAN builds of the package for user testing. The devtools package on the other hand makes it really easy to install packages from source hosted on GitHub. Additionally, we hope that GitHub will make collaboration with others more effective. Thus, bookmark http://github.com/mages/googleVis.

Screen shot of some of the new features in googleVis 0.5.0-1.

There are some exciting new features in the development version of 0.5.0-1 of googleVis, reflecting the enhanced Google Chart Tools API:

New Features

• New functions gvisSankey, gvisAnnotationChart, gvisHistogram, gvisCalendar and gvisTimeline to support the new Google charts of the same names (without 'gvis').
  
• New demo Trendlines showing how trend-lines can be added to Scatter-, Bar-, Column-, and Line Charts.
  
• New demo Roles showing how different column roles can be used in core charts to highlight data.
  
• New vignettes written in R Markdown showcasing googleVis examples and how the package works with knitr.

Changes

• The help files of gvis charts no longer show all their options, instead a link to the online Google API documentation is given.
  
• All googleVis output will be displayed in your default browser. In previous versions of googleVis output could also be displayed in the preview pane of RStudio. This feature is no longer available with the current version of RStudio, but is likely to be introduced again with the release of RStudio version 0.99 or higher.
  

I will post about the new features and changes in the coming weeks. Please feel free to test the development version already. Visit our GitHub project page for installation instructions and further details.

For the impatient (you will require R >= 3.0.2):

install.packages(c("devtools","RJSONIO", "knitr", "shiny", "httpuv"))
library(devtools)
install_github("mages/googleVis")

googleVis code development moved to GitHub

After nearly 4 years of developing googleVis on Google Code with SVN we decided to move to GitHub. The main reason was that Google stopped the facility of hosting pre-CRAN builds of the package for user testing. The devtools package on the other hand makes it really easy to install packages from source hosted on GitHub. Additionally, we hope that GitHub will make collaboration with others more effective. Thus, bookmark http://github.com/mages/googleVis.

Screen shot of some of the new features in googleVis 0.5.0-1.

There are some exciting new features in the development version of 0.5.0-1 of googleVis, reflecting the enhanced Google Chart Tools API:

New Features

• New functions gvisSankey, gvisAnnotationChart, gvisHistogram, gvisCalendar and gvisTimeline to support the new Google charts of the same names (without 'gvis').
  
• New demo Trendlines showing how trend-lines can be added to Scatter-, Bar-, Column-, and Line Charts.
  
• New demo Roles showing how different column roles can be used in core charts to highlight data.
  
• New vignettes written in R Markdown showcasing googleVis examples and how the package works with knitr.

Changes

• The help files of gvis charts no longer show all their options, instead a link to the online Google API documentation is given.
  
• All googleVis output will be displayed in your default browser. In previous versions of googleVis output could also be displayed in the preview pane of RStudio. This feature is no longer available with the current version of RStudio, but is likely to be introduced again with the release of RStudio version 0.99 or higher.
  

I will post about the new features and changes in the coming weeks. Please feel free to test the development version already. Visit our GitHub project page for installation instructions and further details.

For the impatient (you will require R >= 3.0.2):

install.packages(c("devtools","RJSONIO", "knitr", "shiny", "httpuv"))
library(devtools)
install_github("mages/googleVis")

googleVis 0.4.7 with RStudio integration on CRAN

In my previous post, I presented a preview version of googleVis that provided an integration with RStudio's Viewer pane (introduced with version 0.98.441).

Over 80% in my little survey favoured the new default output mechanism of googleVis within RStudio. Hence, I uploaded googleVis 0.4.7 on CRAN over the weekend.

However, there were also some thoughtful comments, which suggested that the RStudio Viewer pane is not always the best option. Indeed, Flash charts and gvisMerge output will still be displayed in your default browser, but also if you work on larger charts and with smaller screen, then the browser might still be the better option compared to the Viewer pane - of course you can launch the browser from the Viewer pane as well.

Hence, googleVis gained a new option 'googleVis.viewer' that controls the default output of the googleVis plot method. On package load it is set to getOption("viewer") and if you use RStudio, then its viewer pane will be used for displaying non-Flash and un-merged charts. You can set options("googleVis.viewer" = NULL) and the googleVis plot function will open all output in the default browser again. Thanks to J.J. from RStudio for the tip.

The screen shot below shows a geo chart within the RStudio Viewer pane of the
devastating typhoon track of Haiyan that hit Southeast Asia last week.

Session Info

RStudio v0.98.456 and R version 3.0.2 (2013-09-25)

Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin10.8.0 (64-bit)

locale:
[1] en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8/C/en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods  
[7] base     

other attached packages:
[1] googleVis_0.4.7 XML_3.95-0.2   

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] RJSONIO_1.0-3 tools_3.0.2  

googleVis 0.4.7 with RStudio integration on CRAN

In my previous post, I presented a preview version of googleVis that provided an integration with RStudio's Viewer pane (introduced with version 0.98.441).

Over 80% in my little survey favoured the new default output mechanism of googleVis within RStudio. Hence, I uploaded googleVis 0.4.7 on CRAN over the weekend.

However, there were also some thoughtful comments, which suggested that the RStudio Viewer pane is not always the best option. Indeed, Flash charts and gvisMerge output will still be displayed in your default browser, but also if you work on larger charts and with smaller screen, then the browser might still be the better option compared to the Viewer pane - of course you can launch the browser from the Viewer pane as well.

Hence, googleVis gained a new option 'googleVis.viewer' that controls the default output of the googleVis plot method. On package load it is set to getOption("viewer") and if you use RStudio, then its viewer pane will be used for displaying non-Flash and un-merged charts. You can set options("googleVis.viewer" = NULL) and the googleVis plot function will open all output in the default browser again. Thanks to J.J. from RStudio for the tip.

The screen shot below shows a geo chart within the RStudio Viewer pane of the
devastating typhoon track of Haiyan that hit Southeast Asia last week.

Session Info

RStudio v0.98.456 and R version 3.0.2 (2013-09-25)

Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin10.8.0 (64-bit)

locale:
[1] en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8/C/en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods  
[7] base     

other attached packages:
[1] googleVis_0.4.7 XML_3.95-0.2   

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] RJSONIO_1.0-3 tools_3.0.2  

Display googleVis charts within RStudio

The preview version 0.98.441 of RStudio introduced a new viewer pane to render local web content and with that it allows me to display googleVis charts within RStudio rather than in a separate browser window.

I think this is a rather nice feature and hence I have updated the plot method in googleVis to use the RStudio viewer pane as the default output. If you use another editor, or if the plot is using one of the Flash based charts, then the browser is still the default display.

The behaviour can also be controlled via the option viewer. Set options("viewer"=NULL) and googleVis will plot all output in the browser again.

Of course shiny apps can also run in the viewer pane. Here is the example of the renderGvis help page of googleVis. For more information about the new viewer pane see the online RStudio documentation.

For the time being you can get the next version 0.4.6 of googleVis from our project site only. Please get in touch if you find any issues or bugs with this version, or add them to our issues list.

Is this a step in the right direction? Please use the voting buttons below.

Session Info

R Under development (unstable) (2013-10-25 r64109)
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin10.8.0 (64-bit)

locale:
[1] en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8/C/en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     

other attached packages:
[1] googleVis_0.4.6

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] RJSONIO_1.0-3 tools_3.1.0 

Display googleVis charts within RStudio

The preview version 0.98.441 of RStudio introduced a new viewer pane to render local web content and with that it allows me to display googleVis charts within RStudio rather than in a separate browser window.

I think this is a rather nice feature and hence I have updated the plot method in googleVis to use the RStudio viewer pane as the default output. If you use another editor, or if the plot is using one of the Flash based charts, then the browser is still the default display.

The behaviour can also be controlled via the option viewer. Set options("viewer"=NULL) and googleVis will plot all output in the browser again.

Of course shiny apps can also run in the viewer pane. Here is the example of the renderGvis help page of googleVis. For more information about the new viewer pane see the online RStudio documentation.

For the time being you can get the next version 0.4.6 of googleVis from our project site only. Please get in touch if you find any issues or bugs with this version, or add them to our issues list.

Is this a step in the right direction? Please use the voting buttons below.

Session Info

R Under development (unstable) (2013-10-25 r64109)
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin10.8.0 (64-bit)

locale:
[1] en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8/C/en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     

other attached packages:
[1] googleVis_0.4.6

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] RJSONIO_1.0-3 tools_3.1.0