What is this type of circular-link visualization called?

Question

Does this type of chart have a name? More importantly, is there any visualization library I can use to produce it?

alt text http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2007/12/15/us/politics/DEBATE.html

score 13 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 29 '10 at 05:45

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Take a look at Circos:

Circos is a software package for visualizing data and information. It visualizes data in a circular layout — this makes Circos ideal for exploring relationships between objects or positions.

The flowing data blog also had a post on this that you might find interesting:

Visual Representation of Tabular Information – How to Fix the Uncommunicative Table

answered Sep 29 '10 at 05:45

ars

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@grautur I'd like to add this one too: http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/circos/tableviewer/ – chl Sep 29 '10 at 07:26
@chl: very handy, I hadn't seen it. Thanks for pointing it out! – ars Sep 30 '10 at 06:08
another funny website: http://www.visualizing.org/ – chl Oct 04 '10 at 20:15

score 8 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 30 '10 at 22:37

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I found that the dependency graph in Flare is also similar to what I want:

http://flare.prefuse.org/apps/dependency_graph

answered Sep 30 '10 at 22:37

raegtin

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score 7 · Answer 3 · edited Nov 17 '14 at 10:54

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I would just add:

As you point out, Flare has the dependency graph, which Aleks Jakulin argued was similar but better. This was based originally on the "Hierarchical Edge Bundles: Visualization of Adjacency Relations in Hierarchical Data" (Holden 2006).

I personally prefer to use Protovis to Flare directly, and you can look at Mike Bostock's example of the same graphic. Here is also an example of an Arc Diagram in Protovis, which is very similar but laid out linearly.

edited Nov 17 '14 at 10:54

Nick Cox

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answered Oct 01 '10 at 00:22

Shane

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Protovis looks to have been replaced with [d3](http://mbostock.github.com/d3/ex/chord.html). – Jarrod Dixon Feb 24 '12 at 03:20

radek · Answer 4 · 2014-11-17T10:52:23.177

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For the #Rstats crowd there are two other options.

circlize library (package, vignette):

This package aims to implement circos layout in R.

enter image description here

RCircos library (CRAN):

RCircos package provides a simple and flexible way to generate Circos 2D track plot images for genomic data visualization.

edited Nov 17 '14 at 10:52

answered Nov 17 '14 at 10:42

radek

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Even more options [on this SO question](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14599150/chord-diagram-in-r). – radek Nov 17 '14 at 10:53

score 4 · Answer 5 · answered Oct 24 '18 at 15:39

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It is called Chord diagram.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chord_diagram

Now that you know its name you can research for the tool that best suits you. I dont think it is nice to advertise tools.

answered Oct 24 '18 at 15:39

Δημητρης Παππάς

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What is this type of circular-link visualization called?

5 Answers5

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